STA431s11 Final Exam Information
Time and Location
The final exam will be on Tuesday April 19th from 12-3 p..m. in the Davis (South Building) gym.
Office Hours:
- Tuesday April 5th: 11am - 1 pm (Jerry)
- Thursday April 7th: 12-1 pm (Jerry)
- Tuesday April 12th 11am - 1 pm (Jerry)
- Thursday April 14th 11am - 12 (Jerry)
- Friday April 15th 10am - 12 (Jerry)
- Monday April 18th: 2-3pm (Lennon)
Aids Allowed
Calculator (Statistical calculator allowed) and a reference sheet including both formulas and identification rules.
Click here for a copy of the document that will be supplied with the exam.
The guidelines below apply only to the regular exam, not the special deferred exam. The deferred exam will be fair, and some students would find it roughly as difficult as the regular exam. However, there is no SAS part. To compensate for this, students who take the deferred exam are asked to review all homework problems from the term, including the review part at the beginning and the final assignment described below. Examples given in the in-class overheads should be viewed as homework problems with a complete solution.
Format
It's a three-hour exam. You will write your answers on the examination paper.
There are six questions. Most 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. Also see more detailed information below.
Preparing for the exam
If you do nothing else, do the
final assignment. In addition to a few more paper-and-pencil problems, it has a computer part that will appear on the final exam. You will not bring printouts to thew final exam; you'll answer questions based on parts of my printout.
Reviewing the Overheads
Give yourself a nice long slide show. Emphasize the non-computer parts. Use the computer displays only as necessary to help you do the computer part of the final assignment.
Reviewing the Homework
For the exam, some homework problems are more important than others. If you know how to do the following, you will be fine.
- Assignment 1: Review only. Don't bother.
- Assignment 2: 1. For 2, in A.5.2 Questions 2 and 5
- Assignment 3: Just Q4 in Appendix A.3
- Assignment 4: Second part, from Chapter zero.
- Assignment 5: 1, 2. For questions 3 and 4, make path diagrams and apply identification rules.
- Assignment 6: This is just a SAS introduction. Forget it.
- Assignment 7: 1-6
- Assignment 8: Make a path diagram, check rules.
- Assignment 9: All 3 questions. Apply the rules, too.
- Assignment 10: Notice you are proving identifiability rules.
- Assignment 11: 1-3. Notice you are proving identifiability rules.
Old exams
When you look at these, you will see that it's basically from the same course, but students taking these exams were not responsible for exactly the same material that you are. Terminology has changed bit since those exams, and so has notation. In the old notation, X and Y were vectors of observable variables. The old exams talk of models being "identified" rather than of parameters being "identifiable." It means the same thing; a model is said to be identified if and only if all parameters are identifiable.
- STA312 (2007)
- STA431 (2009): The SAS part of this exam also used the poverty data, but the final assignment was quite different and the "right" model from 2007 has little connection to what you will see on your exam.