Poll Procedure

Student newspapers at five Ivy League universities conducted the 1980 Ivy League Presidential Poll, which was coordinated by the staff of The Daily Princetonian.

Almost 4000 surveys were distributed to random samples of undergraduates at Brown, Cornell, Harvard, the University of Pennyslvania and Princeton.

Staff members of newspapers at each college collected about 2500 surveys total, with 501 surveys completed and tabulated for Harvard.

A statistical sampling error of about four or five points should be allowed for most of the figures in the Harvard poll. Thus, the race between Carter and Anderson is too close to call for Harvard students--who favor Anderson over Carter by a statistically insignificant 40 per cent to 35.7 per cent.

Michael R. Kagay, a polling consultant for the New York Times who advised the Princetonian on polling techniques, said that the "uniformity of Anderson strength across all five of the campus polls suggests Anderson will also run very strongly through the Ivy League."

The sample of 501 undergraduates at Harvard conformed to the general population of students in categories of year, sex, race and religion, but off-campus students may have been slightly underrepresented due to difficulties in conducting the poll.