STA200 Summer 2004: Hints About the Final Exam

The final exam will be mostly short answer. There will be no multiple choice questions.

Bring a calculator. It will be very helpful for the exam. No calculators will be available for loan, and no sharing of calculators will be allowed.

The final formula sheet is posted. You should print a copy and use it to practice homework problems for the exam. In a few cases, the formulas from the book have been simplified a bit. This is intended to help you, but it could backfire, especially if you are using the formulas from the book a little blindly. Also, if you think you need a formula that is not on the sheet, please let me know!

The final exam is advertised as comprehenisve, but it will emphasize the later part of the course. Material covered in the last week of class (and on the final homework assignment) is almost sure to be on the exam. Material from the very beginning of the class will not be on the exam. That is, there will be nothing on descriptive statistics, except that means and standard deviations are used in confidence intervals and tests so you have to know what they are.

Your preparation for the exam should start with the homework for Quiz 2, but even this earlier material is de-emphasized. There will be some probalility (including discrete distributions and normal distribution stuff) but the most important topics are confidence intervals and tests. And, tests are emphasized more than confidence intervals. Sixty percent of the marks on the final exam are about hypothesis testing.

There will be no confidence intervals for differences between means or differences between proportions.

The most common type of hypothesis-testing question will be a word problem (maybe with Minitab output), and the following:

  1. State the null hypothesis
    1. In words.
    2. In symbols.
  2. State the alternative hypothesis
    1. In words.
    2. In symbols.
  3. Give the rejection region for alpha=0.05 (or alpha=0.01).
  4. Give the numerical value of the test statistic. The answer is a number. Show your work.
  5. Do you reject H0? Answer Yes or No.
  6. Give the p-value. The answer may be a range of numbers.
  7. State your conclusion
    1. In words.
    2. In symbols.

Some of the questions on the exam do not have answers. This is deliberate. If a question cannot be answered, say so and briefly indicate why. No marks without the correct reason. The most common reasons will be that the distribution is unknown, and the sample size is too small to apply the Central Limit Theorem. This includes the n=1 case. The correct reason will never be related to imperfect sampling (say, a non-random sample).

There is a computer component in the assignment for the final exam, but you will not bring any printouts to the exam. Instead, some of the final exam questions will be closely related to the computer questions on the final assignment, with Minitab output pasted into the exam. If you have done the computer questions you will be well prepared. Take a close look at the first computer assignment again. There could be some material from this one on the final.