A.6 Assignment guide

Here’s a description of each type of assignment. You can find individual assignments on Gradescope and Moodle, with more specific details. If you still have questions, feel free to ask on the discussion forum!

A.6.1 Lectures and readings

Readings may be drawn from the textbook, from lecture notes (which you’ll find posted on this site or linked on Moodle), or from other (free) resources. Always check the reading notes in the relevant Moodle assignment before you dive in; these provide guidance on what to focus on, what to skip, and points I think might be confusing or important. Note that Hyndman also includes videos at the start of most sections – definitely watch these if you find them helpful, but they’re not specifically required.

My own notes sometimes include side comments, such as you see throughout this syllabus. Sometimes these side notes contain extra information, or another way of explaining the concept, or just bad jokes. They’re optional content, but you may find them useful, especially if you have questions about a particular point.

Collaboration and resources: You can work with other people and resources as much as you like while you’re doing the reading and pre-class prep (see below), and you can discuss your responses together. But you have to write out and submit your responses individually; don’t just copy and paste from your study buddy.

A.6.2 Pre-class questions

Okay, so look, I’m not actually going to review these responses until the next morning, i.e. the day of our class. So if you want to roll the dice, you can submit pre-class questions in the morning. But I really recommend that you do them before you go to sleep the night before (whenever that is), for multiple reasons:

  1. There’s substantial research that shows a lot of the learning process takes place while you sleep. If you “sleep on” the new material and your questions about it, you’ll be better prepared to engage with those questions the next day.
  2. Many folks find it simpler to do the PQs at the same time as they read/watch the lectures – one less thing to remember to do.
  3. I get up real early. You may not want to bet on getting your questions in before I look at them.

These are due the night before each of our discussion sessions. They have two goals:

  • Help you assess where you stand with the current material
  • Give you a first exposure to new concepts to prepare your brain for discussion
  • Help me prepare an agenda for the discussion the next day

You need to respond to all the required questions on the Google form to earn full engagement credit for a given day’s PQ. Usually this involves a check-in on how you feel about the recent material, responding to a short question, and coming up with a question of your own – something you’d like to spend more time on or talk about in class. Your question(s) can be about anything in the current material, or if there’s something that’s really eating at you from earlier material, you can ask about that too. They don’t have to be grammatical, but they should be specific. “Outliers????” is not a good question; “Difference between high-leverage point and influential point?” is great.

If you don’t actually have any questions about the material, that’s fine: make them up. Try to think of something another student, such as my Nats plushie Screech, might ask – some point that’s a little tricky or seems important. This way you still get the cognitive benefits of assessing the material and your own understanding of it. When you submit this question, you can note that it’s a “Screech question,” to tell me that I don’t necessarily need to include this topic in our discussion agenda. “No” is not a question at all :)

The questions I ask you on these assignments are designed to get you thinking – they are mostly a check-in for you to track your own understanding. I’ll notice whether you do these responses, but I won’t correct or give feedback on your answers, unless you ask for help with a particular topic and I want to get a sense of where you’re at.

Collaboration and resources: For both your responses and your questions, you can work with other people and resources as much as you like while you’re doing the lectures/videos/reading, and you can discuss your questions together. But write up and submit them individually, don’t just copy and paste from your study buddy. And no, you may not use AI to generate your responses or questions: remember, plagiarism is a thing!

A.6.3 In-class activities/labs/wrap-ups

Class time is a great opportunity for discussions, Q&A, and activities to deepen your understanding and fill in the “holes” you came up with while reading. But in order to make that learning stick, it’s important to reflect on it.

To this end, you’ll be responsible for posting a “wrap-up comment” after each class session that you attend. (No, you can’t do a comment if you weren’t there!) We’ll try to leave a couple of minutes at the end of class time for this, but you can post your comment later the same day instead, if you prefer to think things over first. You’ll see specific discussion forums on Moodle for posting each day’s comment.

Your wrap-up comment doesn’t have to be an essay: just a few sentences about your experience for that class – what you found interesting, important, helpful, challenging, still confusing, whatever. These comments are also super helpful for your classmates – if you miss a class session, you can go look at the wrap-up forum to see what we covered and what you might want to catch up on.

We may also have specific in-class activities or labs on particular days. Typically, you can find these activities on our Moodle site. If I ask you to submit something for an activity, I’ll provide information on how to do so; it won’t be assessed for correctness, just whether it’s complete and reasonably thoughtful.

Collaboration and resources: For in-class activities and labs, it depends on the activity. You’re welcome to use any course resources unless that specific activity says otherwise. Typically, you’ll be working in groups for in-class activities. Your wrap-up comments should always be your own work, though of course you can discuss the class with other folks.

A.6.4 Topic Conversation posts

These are optional, but earn you engagement credit – and, more importantly, can be really useful to both you and your classmates. You do these by making a post in a Moodle discussion board/forum marked “Topic Conversation”; there’s a separate forum for each chunk of course material, plus one for general R issues.

Any kind of post can count – a new thread, a response to someone else’s post, even a question. There’s no time limit on topics; if you’re going back and reviewing module 2 in week 12, you can post a comment to that Topic Conversation. You can discuss practice problems in Topic Conversations, but not Assessments (since some folks in the discussion might be planning to retake them!).

Your post doesn’t have to be super long, just a few sentences: the important thing is that it’s thoughtful, showing you’ve put some effort into understanding (or trying to understand!) your topic. If you’re asking a question, make it as specific as you can, or talk about some guesses you have on the subject or things you’ve tried. If you’re responding to someone else, don’t just say “I agree” and repeat their point: add something of your own. As always, remember to stick to our course ground rules of respectful and positive communication.

Topic Conversations are an important way to practice your statistical communication skills, and they build up a shared body of knowledge that’s really valuable to you and your classmates. So I really encourage you to get in the habit of posting early on! It only takes a few minutes to craft a question or response while you’re already reviewing your notes or studying for an Assessment.

Collaboration and resources: Of course, you can look at any resources (and talk to other folks) while you’re thinking about your post. But as always, anything you write must be your own work; you can’t copy from another person or source, and you can’t use AI to generate any text (no, not even if you then edit what you got). If you need to quote something to make your point, you have to put quotation marks on it and cite the source.

A.6.5 Practice problems

In terms of content, these are pretty close to your basic ordinary homework problem or problem set. There’s about one per week, focusing on the most recent concepts; you can find them on Moodle or Gradescope. They may involve R coding; if you need any external data files, you can find those on Moodle as well, or the instructions will tell you how to get them.

These are different from your typical problem set in that (1) you may be looking at them repeatedly as we move through a module, and (2) they do not get averaged into your course grade. They earn you engagement credit, but if you really wanted to, you could just post to Topic Conversations a lot and skip the practice problems. As mentioned elsewhere, though, I do think you will do them, because that’s the best way to actually learn the material. If you don’t do any practice problems, the Assessment is probably not going to go well. But I don’t want to force you to do extra writing-up on a topic you’ve already grasped perfectly well.

When you complete a practice problem, create a PDF version of your work (or an image file, if there wasn’t any code and you wrote it out by hand) and submit it to the appropriate assignment in Gradescope. Make sure that you match up the pages of your submission with the specific question(s) you answered. If you didn’t answer all the questions, Gradescope will throw you a warning about not having pages matched to everything, but you can ignore it.

By default, practice problems aren’t graded. Most likely, I’ll make solutions (or partial solutions) available so you can check your own work. If you’d like more direct feedback on something in your practice problems, drop on by office hours to chat about it, or drop me an email asking me to look at part of your submission.

The TAs/graders will assess whether you made an honest effort at the problems, for the purposes of earning engagement credit. An “honest effort” doesn’t mean you necessarily have every answer correct; it means your work shows that you put time and thought into it. If you can’t figure out a question or aren’t sure about your answer, write down some words about your thought process, what you tried, and what specific part you’re stuck on.

Collaboration and resources: You can work with whatever people and resources you like on practice problems. If you write them up together with someone else, both (or all) of you should clearly cite each other in your submissions. But I recommend that you write up your answers on your own instead, even if you work on the problems with a buddy, because that’s how you know you personally understand the material.

This is a good moment to mention the existence of external (non-Mount-Holyoke) stats tutors, websites, guides, etc. You can draw on these for practice problems (not for Assessments though!), but do so with caution. Some of them aren’t great, and others may not use the same notation or approaches that we do in class. Generally, you are safest relying on our course materials, textbook, and TAs (and me!). If you find something from an external source that doesn’t seem to match with what we’re doing, ask about it! And of course, any time you are using such a resource, you need to cite it appropriately. You should not use ChatGPT or other AI for these or any assignments; see my rant about this in the “Academic integrity” section here.

A.6.6 Assessments and retakes

Assessments are where you demonstrate your proficiency with concept-type learning goals. You may be given some specific work to do or problems to look at in order to prepare for an Assessment ahead of time, but the Assessment itself takes place “live,” in a limited time block. This is because, while it’s important to practice things like R coding and taking your time with deep problems, it’s also very important to have key concepts “ready to hand” and be able to apply and interpret things in real time.

Assessments may be either in written or oral format:

  • Written ones are typically done during class time, on paper; be sure to contact me if you have accommodations around extra time, using a computer, etc.
  • Oral Assessments are short, in-person conversations; you’ll sign up for a time slot to talk with me. During our conversation, I’ll ask you some questions very similar to the practice problems for that module; you’ll give some answers, and we’ll discuss. Because the conversation is live, I can prompt you if you get stuck, rephrase the question, etc.

By default, there’s a new Assessment every two weeks, on Wednesdays. In the alternate weeks, you instead have a time slot to re-attempt a previous Assessment if you want to: see below.

Each Module contains multiple learning goals; the corresponding Assessment gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your progress on each goal. You earn a separate proficiency score for each learning goal, using the ESPN scale (details here).

If you’re not satisfied with your proficiency levels, you can re-attempt the Assessment (yay!). You have to retake the entire Assessment, even if you’re only working to improve one of the learning goals. To do so, you request a retake using the online Google Form. I’ll give you a different version that deals with the same topics. Again, see here for rules about retakes. Here are some points to remember about retakes:

  • You have to request them, by the given deadline for that retake slot! I will not automatically assume you want to re-attempt anything.
  • Retakes are not automatic just for the asking :) In order to do a retake, you must submit a thoughtful and specific reflection about your previous attempt: what didn’t go well, the topics or issues you reviewed, why it’ll be better this time. You cannot do a retake without a satisfactory reflection.
    • Third attempts on the same module are not impossible, but they’re not typical. If you’re requesting a third attempt, you have to talk to me first, and your reflection needs to be extra thoughtful – you need to convince me that this time is really going to be better :)
  • If any proficiency on your previous attempt was N (not assessable), you have to talk to me before you can re-attempt that Assessment. (This is a good reason to try practice problems first, instead of jumping straight to the Assessment!)

Collaboration and resources: Allowable resources may vary from one Assessment to the next. You can’t work with any other people on the in-class (graded) portion of an Assessment, and you also cannot discuss the Assessment with anyone else after you’ve taken it, unless you’ve both already achieved E proficiency on all the learning goals for that module (and won’t take another version of that Assessment in the future).

A note about making notes sheets: while it’s fine to work with other students and resources while studying for Assessments (within the restrictions for each specific Assessment), it’s really important to make sure that whatever is written in your notes is your own work, reflecting your own understanding. If you want to copy someone else’s words or explanations into your notes, you must put them in quotation marks and write down where they came from. If you don’t, that’s plagiarism – and worse yet, you may forget that those words weren’t yours and copy them into your answers! Accidental plagiarism is still plagiarism – so build your notes to avoid this issue from the start.

A.6.7 The Project

Projects are (a) awesome and (b) how you practice your applied skills. There are four projects in this course; they’re separate, though you might reuse some parts of one project in later projects.

You can think of the four projects in pairs: two focus on the skills of learning and communicating a new technique to your colleagues, while the other two focus on the skills involved in doing an analysis of a new, real-world dataset. There’s a “small one” and a “big one” of each type; this gives you multiple chances to practice each skill set.

You can see how the projects line up with the course learning goals here. Note that there are no retakes on projects – but the learning goals from Project 1 and Project 2 are also possible to demonstrate on Project 4 and Project 3, respectively, so you do get a second chance if you need it.

Collaboration and resources: This varies by project – some you’ll do solo, others in collaboration with your classmates. Consult the detailed description of each project for more.

Starter analysis

or: Data analysis: the small one

The focus of this project is getting used to bringing time series data into R, processing it, and describing/plotting it – including a time series decomposition. You’ll prepare a concise writeup, presenting your dataset and what you’ve learned about it. This writeup will be due around Week 4 of the semester.

Mini-presentation

or: New topic: the small one

For this project, you’ll give a short (like, 5 minutes!) presentation to your classmates about a topic we haven’t specifically covered in class. Your topic here will be more small-scale, like a practical tip, data issue, or variation on something we’ve seen before (see the sections of HA chapter 12 for examples). I expect these presentations to start in week 4 or 5, but they’ll continue across several weeks; the date of your presentation will depend on the topic you’re discussing!

New topic: the big one

This project involves giving a more extended presentation to your classmates – also on a topic we haven’t covered in class, but this time, a larger/more involved/more advanced topic. You’ll work with a small group to learn about your topic and create your presentation. I expect that these presentations will be during Week 10.

Data analysis: the big one

In this project, you’ll go into more depth on the analysis of a real-world dataset. After importing and processing the data, you’ll apply the various methods and models from the course, discuss what you’ve learned, and argue for which method(s) would be best for your analysis.

This is a small group project, but an individual assessment. That is, you’ll work with your group to perform your analysis, create a writeup, and present your findings to the class – but I will meet with you individually to talk about your analysis and check your individual mastery of the skills. The presentations will be around Week 13, with the individual meetings over the following week or so.