i do statistical consulting as part of my day job responsibilities, i’m afraid to say this is not how it works.
if you came to me with this question i would roll back to ask what exactly you are trying to achieve with the analyses, before getting into the additional constraints you want to include. unfortunately it’s far more challenging if the data owner comes to the statistician after the data are collected rather than before (when principles of experimental design as ilya mentioned can be considered to achieve ability to successfully answer those questions using statistical methods).
that said, temporarily ignoring the additional constraints you mentioned (e.g. whether and how to transform data; exponential decay and what that actually means with respect to student evaluation scores; magic word “bayes”) perhaps a useful search term would be “item response theory”.
i do statistical consulting as part of my day job responsibilities, i’m afraid to say this is not how it works.
if you came to me with this question i would roll back to ask what exactly you are trying to achieve with the analyses, before getting into the additional constraints you want to include. unfortunately it’s far more challenging if the data owner comes to the statistician after the data are collected rather than before (when principles of experimental design as ilya mentioned can be considered to achieve ability to successfully answer those questions using statistical methods).
that said, temporarily ignoring the additional constraints you mentioned (e.g. whether and how to transform data; exponential decay and what that actually means with respect to student evaluation scores; magic word “bayes”) perhaps a useful search term would be “item response theory”.
good luck