Wednesday, October 20, 2010

General announcements & thoughts

People,

Well well, dekhtey-dekhtey half of week 2 has gone by. Another 2.5 weeks to go. Only. Lots to do and a lot has been done too, if you think about it.

I would urge folk to start thinking in terms of Phases I & II.  Kindly start reaching out to potentials who may ultimately take the survey. Email saying you will be contacting them with a survey and so on. Better to try and recruit as many as possible early on even while the questionnaire design stage is in progress.

Hopefully, we will have sorted out the group formation confusion for the vast majority of people today itself. Again, people, start off ASAP. Do consider launching a group-specific Wiki to help things along.

We discussed a real websurvey launched in the US in 2008 - the Ice cream dataset today. The word doc with the questionnaire plan is typical of how surveys are designed before we transplant the questions online. There is a summary dataset associated with this survey putup currently on blackboard. I will further on also putup a raw data set and give out some homework questions along with it. Again, the homework is for practice only - no need to submit etc. 

I've been getting queries about possible tutorials and solutions to the homeworks. Well, I haven't solved the homeworks myself, and would be quite happy to share anybody's solution up here on the blog. Would be nice to have a homework solution thread where people can share different and hopefully more efficient ways of getting these simple basic analyses done on excel or other software.

Haven't heard about the JMP issue. Pls let me know how that one is going.

OK, the format of the midterm has been finalized with the ASA. There'll be 3 parts to the exam - a 30 minute multiple choice question one, a 45 minute short answers one (case or caselet based among other things), and finally a 45 minute laptop based practical analysis exercises one. The first 2 parts are closed-book closed-notes but have a cheat sheet permitted. Part 3 is open-book, open-notes and open-laptop. You'll have a 20-30 minute break between parts 2 and 3 to ready your laptops and download the dataset.

The blog hasn't found much participation or interaction with the class as yet. I continue to hope that may change in the coming days. In any case, it has reduced the amount of mass emailing I'd done compared to last year.

Chalo, enough for now. Ciao.

Sudhir

3 comments:

  1. I am more than happy that the blog has reduced your mass mailing as I am quite overwhelmed by the amount of e-mails (in particular the ones I do not have any interest in :D ) here at ISB. And people back at ESADE complain about how many e-mails they get...seems not a problem to me anymore :)

    Anyway, I read your comments on the exam (and as usual when a professor speaks about exams, students become more active) and was wondering about the cheat-sheet (again not wondering, isn't it?). Would it be 1 sheet where we can use both sides of the sheet?

    Thanks for your kind answer,

    Marc

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  2. Regarding JMP - according to I.T, we need to update the license from this URL:

    \\isbdata\AV_GeneralSharing\JMP_new

    Hope this helps.
    Regards,
    Anmol

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Marc,

    Yes, its 2 sides of a standard A4 sized page. However, IMHO, one wouldn't need a cheat sheet really, to do well in the exam. A little bit of diligence and regularity in looking up class contents and concepts after every lecture should suffice, mostly.

    Hi Anmol,

    Thanks a lot for the info! We'll soon (as in, by lec 6, wade into quantitative analyses where JMP will be required.

    Sudhir

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