Project 3

30 points

Due at 4:00 p.m., Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Consider the following hypothetical, yet realistic, scenario:  Quantiata College is a small, private, four-year liberal arts institution on the east coast.  Many Quantiata College students satisfy the quantitative skills requirement by taking the course Math 100, Quantitative Literacy.  At the end of the course, students are required to take a quantitative skills assessment to help determine how well the course is working for the College.  The file QuantitativeAssessmentData.xls contains four columns of data:  the gender of the student, the year (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) when the student took the course, the student's score on the assessment, and the student's GPA at graduation.

Your task is to analyze this set of data.  You should do the following things:

• Check to see if the assessment scores are normally distributed.  Be thorough in your analysis -- create an appropriate graph, compare percentages of data in appropriate intervals, and so on.  Recall that we discussed this kind of analysis in class on April 13.
• Create some smaller random samples (stratified, perhaps?) to check how well they represent the full data set.  We will discuss sampling on April 27.
• Explore the relationship between the two quantitative variables, assessment score and GPA.

While certain tasks are required, some of them are somewhat open-ended.  You should decide the best way to do the requested analysis.

When I grade your paper, I will be looking for the following things:

• Inclusion of a title.
• An introductory paragraph that describes the purpose of the paper and why it is of interest.
• A coherent write-up, with transitions between different elements.
• A concluding paragraph which summarizes the main ideas of the write-up.
• Presentation (as usual, you should use Word) including labeled figures, tables, spelling, and punctuation.
• Quality and appropriateness of graphs and tables (if applicable).
• Clarity, quality, and depth of written descriptions and explanations.