End-term updates

Hi all,

Update: R tutorial announcement:

22-Nov Friday 4-6 pm at AC8 LT (tentatively). Will get a venue confirmation and update here. Would be nice if every group is represented at the tutorial.

Sudhir

1. Exam related Cases:

There are two full-length cases in your course-pack: The 'Coop' case, and 'The Fashion Channel' case.

At least one of these two cases will feature in the end-term exam. I'd rather you not try to read the case for the first time in the exam hall. Pls read them at home beforehand.

Preferably, discuss them in a group on the lines of the following Qs:

• What is the management problem? Describe also the major symptoms.
• What are some of the likely decision problems (DPs) that emerge based on the management problem?
• List a few research objectives (R.O.s) that emerge based on the DPs.

2. End-term exam pattern Notes

• There are a total of 50 Qs, 2 marks each.
• The Qs are broken down into 8 Question-sets, each having tables or figures and Qs based on them
• The Qs are all short-answer - True/False, fill-in-the-blanks, write expression for ...., name these factors, type of stuff.
• If any Q comes from any pre-read, the concerned pre-read will be specified in the Q itself. So bring your course-pack to the exam. Not all pre-reads are relevant, only the ones I've specifically asked you to read. Properly speaking, those pre-reads are a part of the course.
• Nothing that was not covered in class will show up anywhere in the exam.
• At least one question set relates to a full-length case (see above)
• Time will not be a problem - you'll have 150 minutes for a 120 minute paper.

Pls use the comments section to this post for any Q&A so that it is visible to the class at large.

See you in class for our last classroom meeting. Any feedback you have on how to improve any aspect the course etc is welcome at any time.

3. R tutorial and R in your resume:

From the project point of view, if you want an R tutorial at anytime between now and 24-Nov (when I leave for Mohali), pls let me know. A quorom of minimum 5 people must signup for the tutorial which can go as technical as the attendees want. Ideally, one person from each project group would attend.

If you want to include R in your resume, then provided that you have made a good-faith attempt at installing and running R for your HWs, provided that you intend to continue to invest in R going forward and provided that you have been able to read the code sent and get a "sense" of the analysis, pls consider amending and using any relevant subset of the following (as applicable):

• State what you have done w.r.t R:
• Have developed a familiarity with the R environment
• Have used R to apply and analyze a wide variety of Mktg Research tools (from structured hypothesis testing to text analytics and social media analysis)
• Have gained some understanding of the flexibility and extensibility of the system (installing and using packages and interfaces with external repositaries)
• Have analyzed a full credit course project on the platform
• State what you will do going forward:
• Intend to continue investing in and developing greater insights into the R platform
• Are attracted by the low-cost, license-free unrestricted use terms and rapid-analysis capabilities of the open-source platform
• Believe in R's promise of substantially expanding enterprise analytics capabilities while keeping a tight lid on costs
• Believe in the philosophy of collaborative design, rapid rollout and innate scale-ability
• Bottomline: are convinced of R's compelling cost/benefit calculus for delivering enormous value to the organization

Again, folks, ensure that *only* that subset that applies to you in a bona fide way is used for your statements of purpose, on the resume etc. Making false claims has a habit of coming back to bite you at inconvenient times.

Good luck for the exam and going fwd for the placements as well.

Sudhir

Some Q&As over exam paper viewings

Hi Professor,

I remember at the beginning of the course you mentioned 10 points for attendance. But I see that it’s counted as 7 points. Could you please look into it?
Thanks,
M

My response:

Hi M,

The attendance and CP together constitute 15% (refer course pack and session 1 slides).

Each session attended fully carries a 1% point credit. However, the first session is not counted (it is prior to final registration). And of the remaining 9 sessions, upto 2 sessions were given 'off' - i.e. no attendance penalty for not showing up in upto 2 lectures. Hence, effectively, the attendance component drops to 7%.

I hope that clarifies

-----------------------------------------------

Dear Prof Sudhir,

My market research experience had been really enriching especially the real life project and data analysis.

I had a separate question on one of the end-term problems. If in a multiple regression, one variable is found to be totally insignificant based on t-value and p-value, can we really take its contribution as more if it has high Beta than a variable who may have a lower beta but is a significant one.

My understanding was we can’t determine the impact solely on Beta in case the variable in not insignificant and only if a variable is significant based on t & p-values, then I can rank them on their impact based on the beta values.

I may be wrong but I wanted to know the right answer and I had given a re-eval request on this aspect too.
Thanks in advance for clarification.
H

My response:

Hi H,

I did go through quite a few re-eval apps which seem to be based on your query. There does seem to be confusion on this score.

1. If a variable isn't significant, then based on either its standardized beta and/or its significance level, it will not show up as impactful. If the standardized beta is still large, it can't be insignificant. The 2 don't go together.

2. If a variable has been used in a regression model and later found insignificant, that still doesn't mean the variable can be dropped when computing predicted values. Many folks appear to have made this mistake. This is because, the coeffs of all other variables are obtained given the presence of this variable in the regression. The alternative could be to drop the variable, re-run the regression and then use the new coeffs (betas) from the new model (which does not use the dropped variable) for prediction.

I hope that clarified. I'm glad to hear the project was found to be relevant and useful. As always, I'd appreciate candid and constructive feedback on how to improve the course for next year and beyond.

Regards,

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Professor Voleti,

As posted on your blog: there was a typo in the binary logit question. The coeff of income^2 was shown as -.088 instead of -0.88. Hence, the predicted probabilities of channel watched for all 3 cases would now come up as 1.

I along with many other students spent a lot of time trying to solve this question but gave up after trying parts 1 and 2. The probabilities came as 1 for part 2 and by just looking at parts 3-4 we concluded that we would get the same answer and hence we left them blank.

I feel its unfair that we have been awarded 0 marks for parts 3-4 when people have been given full marks for restating the formula stated in parts 1-2.

Can this evaluation scheme be looked into again, taking into account that the data for the question was wrong and we have understood the concept since we have correctly answered parts 1 & 2?
S

My response:

Hi S,

After the typo, the answer to Q2 - (c) (ii)-(iv) comes up as Pr(channel)=1 in all three cases. Because of the typo, we realized people may get different answers etc., so we decided to award marks to all who attempted the Q.

If Pr=1 in all cases, then this should have been written down in all three cases.

If the space is left blank, then what judgment is a grader to make? Even stating that in words that the answer is coming Pr=1 in all three cases would have given us grounds to award partial if not full credit there.

But graders can't do anything when students leaving a Q blank with no justification why it was not attempted.

So I'm sorry, I cannot at this time accede to the request of changing the grading template to include non-attempts as well simply because I cannot justify doing so. The AAs have been quite liberal with awarding credit in the concerned Q due to the typo.

Hope that clarifies.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Prof Sudhir,

I just checked the answer keys of the end term paper and it appears to me that there are a couple of issues there.

In a log log regression a fixed percentage increase in the dependant variable leads to a B*the percentage increase of the dependant variable. The question asked whether 1 ounce increase in size on average will lead to a 2% increase in sale. The Size is increase is absolute and hence the statement is false and the answer key appears to be wrong to me.

Also if both adjusted R2 and R2 are both given then we should we not consider the adjusted value as a goodness of fit indicator as it takes into account the degrees of freedom and the sample size thereby explaining the variance more accurately. Additionally the question itself had a misprint 82.%% and leads to ambiguity.

I have put the paper for revaluation based on the above. Would be great if you can help me clear my doubts/errors in interpretation.

Regards
R

My response:

Hi R,
I agree with your first point. The 'sales' in the LHS are unit sales and not sales vol in ounces. The correct answer should be FALSE in Q1 - (c) -(ii). Chandana and Pankaj, We should meet to discuss this and any other corrections that would arise.

Re your second point, well Q1-(c)-(iv) asks not about assessment of model fit but only about % of variance explained by Xs in the Y. The latter is appropriately defined by the multiple R-sq while the former is better described by the adj-R-sq.

Re the typo in this part (82.%%), well the correct answer is 83.1% and hence I would have mistyped it as 83.%% instead of 82.%% if I meant the multiple R-sq. So I cannot accede to changing this part of the answer key.

Hope that clarifies.

Sudhir

-----------------------------------------------------------------

More as they come.

Sudhir

Exam related Q&A

Update: Pls read the Coop case in the course-pack. Bring the coursepack with you to the exam hall.

Hi All,

Have just now emailed the end-term exam to ASA and asked the AAs to put up the practice exam on LMS. Admittedly, preparing an open-book exam is not fun. Still, I did the best I could.

1. Ideally, questions would be close-ended and easy to sort out. However, some questions are perforce open-ended and involve text asnwers. To avoid confusion and overly long-winded answers, the exam is limited-space only. Meaning, there'll be some space provided within which your answer should fit. Anything written outside the given space will *not* be counted for evaluation.

2. The end-term has 5 questions, is designed for <2 hours but you will have 2.5 hours to do it in. So, time will not be a problem.

3. I reckon, as long as you're structured in your thinking, economical in your use of words, well-planned in your approach to the answer and reasonable in the assumptions you make and state, you should be OK.

Update: Let me re-emphasize that given constrined resources (answer space, in this case, and the use of pens rather than pencils) proper planning and organization will go a long way in helping students. I'd strongly advise making a brief outline of the answer first on provided rough paper before actually using the answer space.

Please feel free to use technical terms as appropriate, highlight keywords etc if that helps graders better understand your emphasis when making a point.

4. The practice exam is about half as long as the end-term but the question types etc are broadly the same. No solution set will be made for the practice exam, it is just for practice only.

Do bring a calculator to the exam.

Any other Qs etc you have on the exam, I'll be happy to take here and add to this thread.

Sudhir

For folks who have missed quizzes

Hi all,

There have been folks who have happened to miss quizzes for whatever reason. I'm writing this up to say, 'Don;t worry about it'. You won't get a zero in the quiz you've missed. We'll find some way to impute your quiz marks such that nobody - you or the rest of your section - is disadvantaged in any way.

Sudhir.

Good luck.

Update: Alrite, Pls feel free to use this post's comment section for post-midterm post-mortems, if any.
-------------------------------------
[Good luck] for the midterms.

Well, by the time this post goes up, you'd all be in the exam hall only.

Good luck and Godspeed.

Sudhir

Tutorial Thu 9 pm AC2

Update: Some folks have class right till 9.15 pm tomorrow, am told. Well, at most I can move the tutorial to 9 pm. I suspect by the time things get warmed up it will already be past 9.15 pm. So, 9 pm tomorrow it ia, folks.


Hi All,

Tutorial happening. Pivots and SOLVER will be covered. Any other midterm queries are also fine. Bring your laptops. Might upload some more datasets for practice.

Sudhir

P.S.
Update:
 Pls enter the URL of your's group's survey in the google form given at this link:
http://marketing-yogi.blogspot.com/2010/10/phase-i-submissions.html

Midterm related Clarifications

Hi all,

Some quick clarifications re the midterms.

1. There are 3 parts to the midterm - an MCQ part, a short answer part and a laptop based part with marks 25, 35 and 40 respectively. They will also get 30, 45 and 45 minutes respectively. Only the last part is open-book, open-notes whereas the first 2 parts are open-coursepack and cheat-sheet only.

2. Nothing not covered or mentioned in the slides will come for the exam. Look at the textbook only if some slide covered concept is unclear for any reason.The textbook is more for reference - you should know what to look for and where when faced with MKTR problems down the line at work.

3. Hypothesis testing as covered in Lecture 6  will not be covered in the midterm. SOLVER and PIVOT however are very much within bounds.

Any further midterm Q&A, kindly use the comments section below.

Weekend Mailbag

Update: More Mailbag:

V writes:

Could you please post sample questions for both parts of the exams?
 One more que: the MCQs on the slides are any representative (of content and level of difficulty) of the questions you might ask in the exam?

My response:

Hi V,

Am yet to make the main paper itself. The sample paper will likely have to wait. I hope to release a few sample questions at least 24-36 hrs prior to the exam.

The MCQs will be a mixed bag - some easy, some moderately easy and a select few, tricky. The class slides are more to stimulate discussion, critical thinking etc than to 'settle' an issue this way or that. Hence, no, the MCQs in the exam will leave a lot less room for interpretation and controversy, I hope.

Sudhir

Hi all,

Shall keep updating this post with more mail queries that are sharable with the class at large. So kindly check for updates every once in a while.

'S' writes:

Dear Professor,

Would it be possible to please upload the answers to beer dataset practice questions. It will really help us in verifying if we have got the answers right.

My response:

Hi S,

I haven't made any solutions to the beer dataset myself. However if you wish to share your solutions with the class (anonymously, if so preferred), I'll be most happy to do so on the blog so that other people can compare answers and confirm/disconfirm particular solutions.

Sudhir

Exam announcement - the Coop case

Update:
Folks, Piyush has raised an important question regarding phase I submissions in the comments section to which I have replied there. Kindly carry that conversation forward in the comments section in case you have any further queries or comments to add. I shall later make a separate blogpost to provide more detailed info on this matter.

Hi all,

ASA confirmed today that you will all be permitted to take your course-packs into the exam hall for the entire duration of the exam. And with good reason. The chicken coop case in the course pack *might* see some action in the exam. Again, 'might' is the operative word here, no guarantees something from there will land up. But if I were you, I'd not take chances with skipping a detailed read-through of the case. Just saying, only.

Do let me know if you're planning to use Wikis to coordinate group project activity.

And pls ensure JMP is up and loaded and ready before mid-term.

Sudhir.

Quiz 1 for sections C & D

Folks,

We had a 10 minute quiz based on the beer dataset for sections C and D today.

There were complaints that some haven't any prior familiarity with Pivots etc and hence are at a natural disadvantage in such a quiz. I broadly agree with the caveat that I'd opened the dataset to the class and the associated homework quite some time ago, put up links and online tutorials to lookup functions and pivot tables here on the blog days ago, and had repeatedly hinted the same might make its way into a quiz or exam. I would expect folks to work these issues out at that time itself.

However, after a conversation with the AA and in the interest of fairness, we have decided to

(i) run a special second quiz on the same topic for people who score between 0-2 out of the 8 marks assigned for the first 2 questions.

This second special quiz will be tougher than the preceding one, mind you.

(ii) have a tutorial based on demand.

Hope that clarifies and helps. Going fwd however, let me clarify that anything homework related should be do-able by you. If you can't do it, ask your group mates or the AA for help.

I shall soon putup raw data for the Ice cream dataset and release a list of practice/homework/ exercise questions. Again, I cannot guarantee that the concepts asked won't landup in a quiz or exam somewhere. For your midterm anyway, you should ensure that all the datasets released are loaded in your laptop.

Exam related mailbag

Hi all,

Shall update this thread with new exam related queries and my replies going forward for the next few days. So pls check this back for new updates every now and then.

Ipsita emailed saying:

Professor,

Could you post a sample excel data and question set for the data analysis part of the mid-term exam.
Also, for the beer data set and ice cream survey data, what are the type of questions do we need to answer.

Regards,

My response:

Hi Ipsita,

The homework questions are lengthier versions of what the exam questions could look like. I plan to open up the Ice-cream survey raw data to the class followed by a series of practice/HW questions for exercise. These shall be fairly representative of what my come for the exam/quizzes etc.

Hope that helps.

Sudhir

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

Negative marking clarification

Class,

Sorry about the confusion. Let me specify more clearly.

There is no negative marking in the MCQs! Pls feel free to attempt them without any tension.

In the non-MCQs, out of the 15% course weightage, there is some negative marking for some 3% of course weightage only. The rest does not carry negative marks. Feel free to attempt sans any second guessing.

The 3% that do carry negative marks will have it written down specifically in the quiestion that there is negative marking.

The rationale for negative marking sounds silly, but it is that, thanks to the 15% restriction, I found myself making questions which had 3 subparts - that taken together would constitute, like, 1 mark.

Now, to allocate 0.33 across the subparts would be overkill. So the scheme I decided upon is that if any 2 wrong, all points lost for these 1 mark questions.

Sorry aboiut the confusion, Its just 3 marks out of 40 for negative marking. Don't worry much about it.

Sudhir

Errata for the solution set

Hi class,

There is an erratum to the prepared solution set. Pls find my response below to the email Swati originally sent.

Hi Swati,

1) >> While calculating the predicted sales, why has the component for “light” (-2.205*0.47) been included when specification (model) 1 does not state “light” as an independent variable.

You are right. The expression for specification (1) misses Light. I simply looked up the table results for coeffs and multiplied mean value with coeffs directly.

That also explains why average size has been missed. The mean value for size should be taken is 144. I pasted that expression directly into excel, hence my answer is wrong.

The correct answers for part (j) should be:

(i) Predicted sales = = 66.773 + 4.419*0 + 1.792*1 -2.205*0.47 +0.015*144 -3.174*7.8757 +2.148*0.5 = 45.765

(ii) Predicted sales = = 66.773 + 4.419*1 + 1.792*0 -2.205*0.47 +0.015*144 -3.174*7.8757 +2.148*0.5 = 48.3921


Am surprised nobody – not a single person – caught this error so far. Thanks for pointing this out! Appreciate it. Shall fwd this email to the entire class, just to make sure, everyone gets it.

>>When calculating the predicted sales, can we take the mean value for ‘size’ given as 144 in descriptive statistics or do we need to find the hidden component of size-square also for it. The mean value of size that has been plugged in the formula has somehow got deleted from the solution key. Reverse calculation show the mean for size taken in this case to be 1641.

No, spec (1) has no quadratic term. So no need to try to find size square. Besides, mean of size square needn’t have the same value as square of mean size.

Sudhir

Latest Exam mailbag

Added later:

This one on z-stats:

Dear Professor,

In one question from the quiz,
Q) The z value for a point is the number of standard deviations a point is away from the mean.
Indicate True or False.
True ( ) False ( )

The answer mentioned is False.
However, as far as I know, Z=(x-mu)/sigma Which means that x=mu+sigma*Z.

So shouldn't the correct answer be True?

My response:

I agree. I also believe it is TRUE.

I remember a discussion about this with the AAs. The question bank, IMO had got the answer wrong. In any case, to avoid confusion, we ended up giving everybody the benefit of doubt on this one.

Sudhir

This one on MDS

When two or more brands are close to each other on a dissimilarity map, does that mean they are more dissimilar or they are more similar? Is a similarity map the opposite of a similarity map?

My reply:

No, spatial maps *always* depict similarities only. SO 2 brands close to each other on a perceptual map are more similar to each other than to any far off brand.

Dissimilarity scores can be transformed into similarity scores and then used as a distance measure in the MDS program.

Sudhir

Got these mails:

Dear Sudhir,



It is very confusing, in terms of which Lectures to study. It would have been great, if apart from the book chapters the Lectures were specified.



Most of us study for exam based on the lecture notes, and now I am not sure which lectures to really focus on.



Ex: One response on blog says MCQ questions based on Lec 3, 6 and 7 alone. So shall I skip Lectures 1, 2, 4 and 5 and be safe for the exam?



Regards,

R

My reply:

The MCQs are based on chapters only. Within the chapters, if anything has not been covered/mentioned in the slides, ignore it.

BTW lec 5 is the modeling primer. The non-MCQ part borrows from there quite a bit, as you can see from the practice exam.

I would say, read all the slides. And only the book chapters mentioned for MCQs. And within those chapters, only that portion which was covered/mentioned in the class.

Hope that helps.

Another common question:

Dear Professor,



The exam instruction mentions that 2 A4 papers, 2-sided cheat sheets allowed.

Just to clarify, does this mean 4 different sides of the cheat sheets?

My reply:

Yes Priyom.

The instructions mention this, IMO. 4 different faces of A4 page are allowed.

Another one:

Prof Voleti,

Sorry for bothering you with this mail-I haven't been able to cull out the relevant information from your blog. The chapters for MCQs have been specified in the TA's earlier mail so there's no ambiguity on that. However, the chapters for the rest of the exam are still not clear. Could you tell me specifically which chapters are coming and which portions to leave out.

Tks and Rgds

My response:

For the non-MCQ part, feel free to ignore the chapters and go by the lecture slides alone.

Use the textbook only for reference to clarify anything in the slides.

The practice exam is very much like what the real exam will be like. YOu can see that its based more on the modeling primer and regression than on anything from the textbook directly.

Teacher's POV: Why practise sets are not a good idea

Janta,

Have prepped and emailed solutions to all but 1 of the practice questions created yesterday.

Admittedly I was (and am) not keen on making either the practice questions or their solutions.

From a teacher's POV - the concerns are twofold - learning and grading. While the learning part isn't harmed by the practice sets, the grading part is now certainly more difficult.

IMHO, there is precious little leeway to make good questions that can test your mettle in MKTR_105 simply because while the 5 week course offers good breadth and scope, it doesn't always offer sufficient depth to permit the kind of testing I have in mind.

Further, it didn't help that we'd already bound ourselves into the "25% MCQ from these 6 chapters only" straitjacket. More flexibility lost.

So when I first heard that practice question sets are expected, I was like "What?! No Way!" because I didn't (and don't) think I would have much left to work with. Then the AAs prevailed that "no, practice exams are SOP @ ISB, they are totally done only" etc. I figured maybe I can tweak the questions I have sufficiently to make them quite disguised etc.

And then I was clear, "no solution sets!" Now I'd really have nothing left to work with and everybody will ace the exam!

Then this morning, the mailbox was full of student emails with this query or that. I figured it's less of a hassle to make indicative solutions that don't have to give much away. But when I actually got down to making solutions, I figured "Hey I'm already writing solutions, might as well do a good job".

So there you have it, the whole story.

My main concern now is that the class may be outside the optimal zone in terms of overall performance. I fear the class average on the project may be too low and on the exam may be too high making grading difficult in either case. Ideal situ a good variation in these critical course components - the project and the exam - that permits a natural ordering to arise.

Anyway, you have the solution sets now. They're fairly precise and representative of the exam non-MCQs.

Should anyone find any mistakes, wrong calculations, wrong logic or other such issue with either the questions or the solutions, do please let me know! Would appreciate it.

P.S.

Am away 11.30-8 pm today. Will be in office 8.30-10 pm in case people want to meet with any exam queries. I was in office quite a while yesterday but fewer groups showed up than had expressed interest in meeting over email. Anyway, over the next few days, I intend to be around as much as possible. Pls send meeting requests because they go directly to my calendar and don't rely on my admittedly shaky memory.

Sudhir

More Exam mailbag

Got this email today:

Dear Sir,

First of all thank you for applying labels to blog posts. That surely helps.

Question I have is whether we need to know the concepts which are in book but are neither in slides nor covered in any lectures ?
For ex in chapter 7 there are few concepts which were not touched upon in class like the following .

1) Controlled test market
2) Simulated test market
3) Test marketing
4) Latin square design
5) Randomized block design.


Thanks and Regards,

My Response:

No, if it hasn’t been covered in the lectures and/or the slides, simply drop it from consideration .

For terms that do show up on slides though but haven’t found much mention or discussion in the lecture, basic definitions are quite enough – at least a bird/plane level understanding of what it is would be safe to have though.

But things like non-parametric tests and all are simply way beyond the scope pf the course. I mean they would be nice and relevant to do if we were to seriously undertake a study of basic economic or business modeling but not in this course.

Hope that clarifies.

Sudhir

Exam related mailbag

More email jussnow:

Hi Professor,

There are some portions in the prescribed chapters which you hadn’t mentioned during the class;
for e.g., most of the content under Non-Parametric Tests (K-S one-sample test, runs test, binomial test, etc.).
Some portions of these are also heavily quant-intensive.

Can we assume that we will not be tested on these concepts, either in the MCQ or non-MCQ sections?

P.S. – There are similar chunks in other chapters too, which I’m not listin here for brevity.
So is it safe to assume that if something was absolutely not mentioned in your class presentations,
then we can ignore those from the exam perspective?

Please clarify.

My reply:

Kindly safely assume that nothing that was not covered in class/mentioned on lecture slides will show up anywhere in the exam.

Tks.

Sudhir

Another email:

Dear Professor,

Just wanted to clarify a couple of things reg the exam. Do we need to know Phi Coefficient, Contingency Coeff., Cramers V, Lambda etc. Also, to what extent do we need to know about Chi Square, F-stat etc. Would we need to know the computation and calculation or just the concept

Thank you.

Regards,

My reply:

Hi S,

No. *None* of the stuff not referred to in the class or the slides is relevant for the exam - either in the MCQs section or the non-MCQ one.

Hope that clarifies.

Sudhir

Sudhir

One more exam related practise question

OK, I forgot to add this question part to the Practice exam questions I had uploaded.

Add the following to the end of Q1) in the practice questions PDF.

(j) Keeping Bud=0, Miller =1 and (Price, size and Promo) at their mean values in the sample, can you predict the level of sales according to Specification (1)?

Can you predict sales for the above if Miller=0 and Budweiser=1?

That should be all. The point of the question was to have you see the predictive uses of basic demand modeling - which is just what we have done now.

Thank you.

Sudhir

Practise questions for exam put up

Hi all,

Pls find uploaded a PDF on blackboard.

It was harder than I had first estimated to create practice questions for the exam. It was tricky making questions for the final too, btw. There are only 4 questions in non-MCQ. I have put up 2 for practice that within them cover more or less all the question types you will see in the non-MCQ portion.

P.S.
Was banking on the exam along with the project creating sufficient variation in total marks so that grading becomes easier and more natural. And now, after putting up the practice questions, am not too sure. I get the feeling everybody's gonna do great and it will make the grading process tricky.

Sudhir