STA302f16 Final Exam Information

Note: This information applies only to the regularly scheduled exam, not the special deferred exam.

Time and Location

The final exam will be on Tuesday December 13th from 5 to 8 p.m. in IB 110. Both sections of STA302 will be in that room. Our exam papers will be yellow.

Jerry's Office Hours for the Final

Eman's Office Hours for the Final

Monday December 5th, 6-7 p.m. This is the time to get any quizzes you have not collected.

Format

You will write your answers on the question paper. The exam will be closed book and closed notes. You should bring a calculator (any kind is acceptable unless it has communications capability). Pencil is okay.

There are 10 questions, occupying 17 pages including the cover page, R printout and space for you to write the answers. Many of the questions have more than one part. The questions are not equally difficult, and not equally time-consuming. The questions on assignments and quizzes are a good indication of what to expect.

It is a three-hour exam. I estimate it will take about 2 hours and 45 minutes for a student who is well prepared.

Seventy-five points out of 100 are prove this, derive that and so on. There is a 10-point question in which you do things like make a table and give the null hypotheses you would test to answer various questions. There is a 15-point question based on my R output. The type of questions will be familiar from the assignments and quizzes. More information about the R part is given below.

Coverage

The final exam is cumulative. What you are supposed to be able to do is indicated by the assignments. The text and lecture overheads are intended to help you understand how to answer questions like the ones in the assignments. If you are wondering whether you're responsible for something, look in the assignments. If it's asked, you're responsible for it. If it's not asked, then you may safely disregard it. This applies to concepts and methods of course, not the exact wording of the questions.

A partial exception to the rule above is Assignment One, which was review. Nothing from Assignment One will directly be on the final exam unless it also appears on a later assignment. Of course the knowledge needed to do Assignment One is assumed.

R

You will not be asked to write any R code on the final. You will answer questions based on my R input and output. Everything will be based on the Hospital Data described below. My plan is to do some reasonable, predictable things like what I did in lecture and what you did in the homework. You should do some of those things too, and think about what the results mean. That way you will be able to understand what I did a lot more rapidly and easily. Be able to draw plain-language, directional conclusions. At the very least, familiarize yourself with the data and understand what all the variables are. This is important because we will not answer questions about the data during the exam.

The Study on the Efficacy of Nosocomial Infection Control (SENIC) data are from a study of infections acquired in hospital. That is, patients are admitted to hospital for something, and while in hospital they get infections (such as pneumonia and urinary tract infections) that are unrelated to why theyt were admitted, and require treatment. This is a partial reconstructed data set based on one in Kutner et al.'s Applied Linear Statistical Models. In this aggregated data set, the cases are 100 U.S. hospitals. The variables are

  1. Hospital identification number
  2. Geographic region of U.S.
  3. Medical school affiliation (Yes or No)
  4. Number of patients
  5. Number of beds in the hospital
  6. Number of nurses
  7. Mean length of stay in days
  8. Mean age of patient in years
  9. xratio: Ratio of number of X-rays performed to number of patients without signs or symptoms of pneumonia, times 100
  10. culratio: Ratio of number of cultures performed to number of patients without signs or symptoms of hospital-acquired infection, times 100
  11. Percentage of patients who acquired an infection while in hospital.

Sometimes mini-epidemics spread through a hospital. The variables xratio and culratio represent special efforts to monitor the health of patients who show no signs of having gotten sick in hospital, yet. They are a kind of early warning system, intended to detect outbreaks of disease in the hospital so they can be dealt with before they get established. My guess is that xratio is primarily for pneumonia, and culratio is primarily for urinary tract infections.

You can read the data into a data frame with hospital = read.table("http://www.utstat.utoronto.ca/~brunner/data/legal/openSENIC.data.txt")

Quizzes and Past Exams

My answers to the quizzes will be posted after you've had a chance to get your quizzes back from Eman and discuss them on Monday. After I post my answers, there will be no further discussion of the marking.

Past exams

  • Quizzes with solutions (but no R code)