STA442/2101f11: About the Final Exam

The final exam is on Tuesday Dec. 13th from 2-5 pm, in West Hall, University College, 15 King's College Circle. It is closed book, closed notes and you will not bring any computer printout. Be sure to bring a calculator with a natural log function. The kind of calculator does not matter, except that you will not be allowed to use a cell phone or any other device that can be used for communication.

Office hours:

• Monday Dec. 12th: 10am - noon

The exam is cumulative; it covers the entire course, excluding the part from the last lecture after Hotelling's T-squared with R. The best guide to what you're responsible for is the homework, and the questions are like the quiz questions. So review the homework as well as the lecture material, except that there will be nothing directly from the first homework assignment. I will mark the final exam.

The final exam is based on a total of 100 points. Forty points are from the earlier, somewhat more mathematical segment of the course; there are two rather easy questions worth 20 marks each. Thirty-five marks are based on computer material.

You will not be asked to write any R or SAS code on the final, and you will not bring any printouts. Instead, there will be a set of printouts that I have produced. They will be based on data sets used in homework and lecture, and the analyses will be standard ones. Though nothing is exactly what you have seen or done before, the data sets will be familiar. The best way to prepare for the computer part is to

• Review all the computer displays from lecture and know what everything means.
• Review the computer parts of the homework assignments, re-doing them correctly if you (or the TA) were not satisfied with what you did the first time. Again, know what information is available from the printout.
• Don't forget the computer questions from the early part of the course.
• Remember, the data sets are familiar. This means that if you have to ask questions about them during the exam, it tells me that you did not bother to prepare -- and I will probably not answer the question unless the answer is very brief. So if you have questions about the data sets, ask them during office hours before the exam.
• Be ready to calculate useful quantities from the printout using a calculator. Any formulas like the famous

  

  will be supplied if necessary, though there will be no separate formula sheet.

• Do one more computer assignment. It is based on the last lecture, and is given below.

The Dichotic Listening Data

In a dichotic listening experiment, subjects wear stereo headphones that allow the presentation of different sound tracks to each ear, at the same time. In this example, right-handed female university students listened to short lectures on art history in the presence of background noise. After each lecture, they answered a set of multiple choice questions.

Two factors were varied experimentally:.

• Noise Type: The background noise consisted of either Hip-hop music, Classical music or Radio commercials. Volume was carefully held constant.
• Presentation: Subjects heard (simultaneously) either
  • Lecture (Signal) in the left ear and distraction (Noise) in the right
  • Distraction (Noise) in the left ear and lecture (Signal) in the right, or
  • Both Signal and Noise in both ears

Each subject in the experiment experienced all nine treatment combinations, in a balanced order that was different for each subject, and randomly assigned. Thus, there are nine data values for each subject: number of questions answered correctly in each experimental condition. The layout of the data is given below:

           Signal in           Signal in            Signal in
           Left Ear            Right Ear            Both Ears
     ____________________ ____________________ ____________________
     HipHop Classc Radio  HipHop Classc Radio  HipHop Classc Radio
     ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------
     test11 test12 test13 test21 test22 test23 test31 test32 test33
 1     13     12     10     15     14     14     14     13     14
 2      4      8      8      6      5      8      6      3      4
 3     13     15     11     11     13     15     11     13     12

Produce some tables of means and do the appropriate analysis, following up any interesting main effects and interactions with Bonferroni-corrected tests. Remember, Hotelling's T-squared for a single contrast is equivalent to a matched t-test. Be able to state conclusions (if any) in plain, non-statistical language.