4 Standards for Lab Assignments
1. ALL lab assignments must be performed using R in RStudio and published using RMarkdown.
Credit will not be given for assignments that are done using other languages or software packages. This means that if you do a lab in Microsoft Excel or in a Jupyter Notebook using Python, or if you do your work in Python in RStudio using reticulate, or in some other way, you will receive a zero for this assignment. No exceptions.
2. Absolutely no hard coding.
In this class, hard coding is when instead of using code to generate some output, you enter the desired output directly. This basically means that you avoid the tricky work of writing a program by taking a shortcut that doesn’t really require any programming knowledge.
For example, suppose that we want to calculate the sum of 2 and 3 and we want to do it in a programmatic way by adding a couple of variables together that we define. Below is an example of such a calculation that is not hard coded.
## [1] 5If we’re struggling with the concept of combining user defined variables or we’re just lazy, we could hard code our answer instead. Below is an example of a calculation that is hard coded.
## [1] 5One of the main goals of our course is for you to develop basic statistical programming skills. If you avoid using the tools and programming knowledge to which you are introduced in order to do your lab work, then this will not happen. And if you fail to demonstrate your ability to use this knowledge and these skills in your labs by hard coding, you can expect to lose a lot of points on every assignment in which this is done.
3. ALWAYS show your code.
This follows from the previous requirement. It won’t be possible to tell whether or not your output is hard coded without being able to see the code which generates the output.
4. Write code that is clean and legible. Do not put several operations on a single line.
This makes it easier for other people to read your code. If you write in an ideosyncratic way, this makes it much harder for your code to be useful to other people or for me or anyone else to evaluate the quality of your code. It will also make it much harder for you to go back weeks, months or even years later and immediately understand your own code.
Look closely at the way in which I write code in the tutorials. You should do your best to write it in the same way.
5. ggplot2 is the only acceptable visualization package for this course.
Of course there are others out there, and you may install these and tinker with them on your own if you wish. But for your lab work, all of your visualizations must be done using this package. One reason for this is ggplot2 is part of the tidyverse package and in order to use data with tidyverse, your data must be in a “tidy” format. One of the goals of this course is to familiarize you with tidy data. One way we will do that is by using tidyverse tools with tidy data. These tools are very powerful, but they don’t work with data that is not tidy.
And to clarify, it is fine to use other packages to augment your ggplot2 visualizations. For example, I often use the ggarrange() function from the ggpubr package to make grids of ggplot2 visualizations. And it is fine to do stuff like this in your lab work when it’s appropriate.
6. All output from your code must be polished.
This means your visualizations must be easy to interpret and so must the output of any calculations you perform. It is up to you to figure out how to do this, although plenty of guidance and examples are given in the lab tutorials. Although you may always understand the output of the code you create because you wrote the code, it is important for somebody else who may have no programming background whatsoever to be able to understand it without having to strain themselves. This will be especially important in the future if you use R or other languages/packages for more data analysis tasks in other courses that you take or in the workplace.
I use examples of polished summaries and visualizations throughout the tutorials. The amount of code this requires may seem daunting at first, but you will get used to it.