Midterm + Schedule for Next Week

My goal in giving tests is NOT to judge students or compare or evaluate. The test is a LEARNING tool -- students are motivated to work hard to solve it, and thereby to understand the material covered. During grading, we have discovered several areas of weakness, which vary among students. Accordingly, by Friday, my TA's UZMA, IRFAN & WAQAR will mail INDIVIDUALIZED MAKEUP QUIZZES to each student. Each student will be asked to REDO calculations and computations that he/she did wrong, and will be given a little additional work that needs to be done to ensure that he/she has the background necessary to solve the problem.

UZMA: Please coordinate this work, assigning each of the three roughly equal share of quizzes to handle, and providing email addresses of the students to send them these individualized assignments.

ASSIGNMENT/QUIZ due SUNDAY midnite April 27th. This is in replacement for this weeks (two) quizzes which are not being given. The assignment is to pick a pair of variable from the WDI data set such that one is related to the other, and DRAW a graph of Y versus X in the manner shown in the Lecture 9 on BIVARIATE relationships. Comment on the nature of this relationship -- what does it tell you about the real world? Please learn how to download and handle the WDI data set in order to get variables for your study. Make sure that every student chooses different variables.  TA's please help students to get data they want.


NEXT: I am going to Jeddah for one week, leaving this Sunday 27th Apr and arriving back on 4th May. In my absence, WAQAR & IRFAN will be taking the lecture 11 and conducting lab on monday and wednesday as usual.
WAQAR & IRFAN: Please design quiz on Lecture 11, on the pattern of the previous quizzes. UZMA will LOAD the quiz onto QUIZSTAR. The pattern is as follows -- Look at the Lecture Slides, and ASSUME that students have these slides in front of them. MAKE questions to test comprehension of the material being presented on the slides.
UZMA: Please provide them with previous quizzes, and tell them how to get access to quizstar so that they have a better idea about the type of quiz they are supposed to design. You will make the final edits and fix and finalize the questions before loading onto quizstar -- this quiz should be available to students on 2,3,4 MAY.

Technical Issues

Some students said that sound was bad on Lecture 10. I just listened to it, but did not find any problems.  You do have to TURN ON the sound from within powerpoint. Go to the SLIDE SHOW tab, and click on Set Up Slide Show. In this menu, there is a check box marked: Show Without Narration. If this is checked then there will be no sound. If you UNCHECK it, then the slide show will play with the narrations. 

Unit 2: Prob & Stat

Congratulations to the class for finishing the first unit on DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS. This is a unique course, based on concepts and techniques not currently available anywhere in the world. I know that the class has worked hard, and learned a lot of valuable skills.

The second unit starts on Monday. The first lecture provide an entirely new approach to probability theory, currently not available anywhere else. I have just revised and put up the new lecture (anyone who downloaded or viewed/listened to the old version should get the new one. It has a few additional slides with additional material. Similarly the files for the lecture and the lab have been updated and put up recently. This can be downloaded from:  LECTURE 10: RANDOM DRAW 

The lecture will be on the usual time 9 to 10:30 on Monday morning. One of my students will be available to explain. Students can also put up questions on the blog about things they do not understand.

The lab will be done on Wednesday, and probably there will be a combined quiz on lab & lecture on Friday.

Lecture 9: Comprehension Quiz

Lecture 9 Comprehension Quiz is now available at QuizStar and the deadline of the quiz is Sunday Midnight.

Lecture 9: Bivariate Relations

Lab on Lecture 8 contains a Do It yourself section at the end which will be taken as the calculation quiz, so there will be no separate calculation. Those who did lab at PIDE already emailed their solutions to Irfan. Those outside PIDE can solve and send their labs to Uzma.

Next Lecture 9 on bivariate relationships will be delivered on Monday between 9 to 10:30 as usual. Comprehension Quiz on Tuesday, and Lab on Wednesday.

A missing comprehension quiz on histograms will be posted by Uzma to be solved during the weekend. The midterm itself was the replacement for the calculation quiz on histograms. 

Lab 8: Density Estimates

This morning, we will do Lab 8 at PIDE from 9 to 10:30AM. Other students can do lab on their own which has been posted on the webpage for Lecture 8. The lab, and associated data set RAINFALL02.xlsx is attached to the bottom of the page. The Computational Quiz for this lab should be available by Friday morning on Quizstar. 

Lec 8: Comprehension Quiz

Lec 8 Comprehension Quiz is now available. You need to open Excel file lec8comp while solving the quiz. which is available at:
https://sites.google.com/site/introstats4muslims/textbook/density

Schedule for April 7th to 14th

We had a disturbed schedule in the past few weeks because of the necessity of going back over material that students had not learned. Hopefully, everyone is caught up by now, and has submitted the midterm. For any special cases having difficulty, I can arrange tutoring sessions -- if they come to me (or to my TA's) for help -- but NOT if they copy and pretend to understand what they dont.

From this week, we should resume regular schedule. Monday, all should watch lecture 8 on density estimation. This is an improvement over the histogram. The class from 9:00 to 10:30 will have my TA's Irfan and Waqar present, and they will explain any issues that are not clear to the students. Then students should READ the textbook chapter: Lec08 Density.docx -- this is attached at the bottom of the webpage for this lecture:
https://sites.google.com/site/introstats4muslims/textbook/density
You may want to watch the lecture again after reading the text -- this time you should be able to follow and understand it much better.

Tomorrow, you should be able to take the Comprehension Quiz on this lecture.  Now we are going to try to take you off bottle feed, so you will only have one day - complete this quiz by midnite on tuesday

On Wednesday, you will have the computer lab, in which you will learn how to make density plots for data in EXCEL, with varying windowsizes.

On Thursday, you should practice these computer techniques on your own, and redo the lab exercises to make sure that you understand how to do it on your own without any help from anyboy.

On Friday you should take the Computational Quiz on Lecture 8. THEN you can rest Sat Sun and prepare for the same schedule next week which will cover Lecture 9.

Clarifications about MIDTERM

1. Question 3 refers to ALL countries -- you should look at the mean and median for all countries -- that will tell you something about what has been happening globally.
2. For question 5, pick ONE small binsize for all the data -- A binsize is TOO small if every bin contains only one or zero points. At the very least, many bins should contain TWO points for very small binsize. A binsize to TOO large if all the data is in one bin. At the very least there should be three or more nonempty bins. 
3. One important aspect of data analysis is to find out any peculariaties in the data. Look at the countries with maximum value and minimum values, and try to explain why some country is high and why some are low. Also look for any unusual events, like countries which had rapid change (relative to other countries. You will get points for pointing out UNUSUAL aspects of your data. EVEN more points if you can explain why this unusual aspect happened because of real world events.
4. Whereas we have been quite lax about deadlines in the past, the deadline on the MIDTERM will be strict. You must submit via email to uzma (uzma.economist@gmail.com) by MIDNIGHT on SUNDAY. Late exams will not be accepted. I have a record of who downloaded their data sets when, and I note that people are still downloading! Excuses will not be accepted. Even 24 hours is enough for finishing this exam -- my estimate is that it should take no more than 3 to 4 hours of work.

Evaluation of Midterm

Midterm will be evaluated on TWO aspects. One part is just technical knowledge. You should know how to compute mean median, draw graphs, and do all of the technical EXCEL manipulations that have been taught in the past few weeks. In your WRITEUP, you should explain HOW you did your calculations, this will help in ensuring that you get a good grade. Your answers will also be checked for accuracy and correctness.

The SECOND part will be evaluating your UNDERSTANDING of how the data set relates to REAL world. For this, you will have to do some research. What is the series you are working with? For example, if it agricultural pollution than it would be high in countries which have high agriculture. EVERY sentence which shows some understanding of how the data sheds light on REAL world issues -- Like Country X is an outllier because it is a purely agricultural economy -- or that African countries score low on this criterion because they dont have industrialized ecoomies -- Country Z is an outlier because it is a purely oil based economy. Sentence which show how data set helps us understand real world issues will be given marks. To write such, you will have to do some reading about how your data relates to the real world.

Instructions for MIDTERM

A: For students who are NOT at PIDE, they can take ANY data series from the WDI data set and work the midterm on this data series. I have posted SOME data series on the website in an EXCEL spreadsheet -- download WDIData.xlsx from MIDTERM page. They can submit midterm by email to UZMA like others, and they will also be graded like others.

 B: Remember that data sets will require some cleaning, by deleting blank rows and columns. That will make it easier to do the spreadsheet calculations. DELETING a row or column is DIFFERENT from deleting data in that row (which is easy). DELETING the row makes the entire row DISAPPEAR from the spreadsheet. In EXCEL 2007 and 2010 there is a menu item on top right hand side which you can click on after highlighting the row or column. To highlight row or column just CLICK on the COLUMN NAME (Letter) or the ROW NAME (number). After that you can delete the row.

 C: HEADING LINE of the data has been removed. This is ANNUAL DATA which starts with c oluimn E being 1960, F is 1961, G 1962, ..., O is 1970, Y is 1980 and so on. It goes upto about 2010 which is column BC - but each series has different amounts of data. You should label the data with these headers so that you KNOW which years your data is for. In many cases, data is available only for a few years (not for all). So delete the BLANK years, and also delate the BLANK countries. Note that blank countries will not usually bother the EXCEL functions, which work correctly -- however, sometimes you need to take into account the SIZE of the data set, so you need to count how many non-blank entries there are.

 D: AFTER doing calculations in EXCEL, you must copy over all necessary information to the WORD document you submit as solution. In the word document, EVERYTHING required for the answer MUST BE PRESENT. YOU CANNOT SAY look at the EXCEL spreadsheet for the solution to this. YOU must copy relevant diagrams and figures into the word document. EXCEL spreadsheet must be submitted separately, so that we can verify the calculations. PLEASE USE YOUR OWN NAME as the name of the documents you submit -- both for WORD and for EXCEL spreadsheet.

Data Sets for Environmental Students

Data Sets for Health Economics Students

Midterm TODAY - Wednesday 2 April 2014

MIDTERM exam is available from following webpage -- Download Midterm  {Click on this link, and then download file named midterm.docx from the bottom of the webpage}. Data set for each student is available from the same page. Note that this is the original data directly from the WDI data set. YOU MAY HAVE TO CLEAN THE DATA. This means deleting blank rows, or deleting countries for which there is no data.