Please note: The assignment is below the grading instructions.

Grading Instructions for the Assignment:

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Now (starting Monday, April 29 at 12:01 AM EDT) it is your turn to play the role of teacher, and evaluate your peers!

For each of the four questions, we have prepared an example solution and some notes on features of a good answer. When evaluating your peers' responses, you are asked to give some written feedback for each question. Please give feedback on what you liked about their answer, and any suggestions you have for how their answer might be improved. Note that a good answer to the question does not need to include all of the detail in the example solutions. Your feedback can be just a sentence or two, or much more detailed, as you feel is appropriate. English is not the first language for many students in the course, so please focus on the interpretation of the statistics and don't worry about any English-language mistakes. Please be sure to be POSITIVE and CONSTRUCTIVE in your comments.

After you have given written feedback on each answer, give each peer an overall rating of 0, 1, or 2. Give a 2 if your peer made a good effort to answer each of the questions. Give a 1 if your peer's effort was somewhat lacking, because their answers did not reflect many of the features of good answers, or perhaps because they did not answer every question. Give a 0 ONLY in the most EXTREME cases in which your peer did not make any effort at all on this assignment.

You will evaluate assignments for 5 of your peers, and 5 of your peers will evaluate your assignment. You will receive full credit for the assignment (10/10) provided that (a) you complete the evaluation of 5 of your peers, and also (b) the median grade that your peers assign to your own assignment is either 1 or 2 (i.e., not 0).

On behalf of ourselves and all of the students, we thank you very much for performing this valuable service of providing your peers with feedback about their homework assignment. It is much appreciated. We hope that you'll find it interesting to read other perspectives on the questions, and that providing the feedback will be a productive learning opportunity for you.

End of grading instructions.

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The assignment starts here.

Introduction to the Assignment

Hello everyone! Now that the videos and quizzes are running along smoothly, it's time for your first homework assignment. This assignment asks you to interpret some very special data -- data about you! Specifically, we will investigate data collected from students in this very MOOC, through the pre-course survey (available for viewing here) and the background knowledge quiz. You'll have to look through various tables and figures about these data, and answer four different statistical questions about them, using the statistical ideas you have learned in Weeks 1 and 2 of this MOOC.

This assignment is not short, so please budget some extra time for it. (Yes, this is in ADDITION to the usual weekly load of new videos and quiz.) On the other hand, you are allowed just a limited number of words in your responses, so don't go overboard -- just concentrate on the most important points. Remember that your assignment will be viewed and graded by your peers next week. Your solutions do not have to be perfect or entirely complete, they just have to show that you have made a reasonable effort to think about the statistical issues involved. We hope that you will enjoy this assignment, and use it as a way of trying your hand at interpreting the results of a statistical analysis, without worrying TOO much about the result as long as you make a sincere effort.

Note that this assignment has a HARD DEADLINE this coming Sunday (April 28) at 11:59 PM EDT, with no flexibility about that (sorry) because we need to start the peer assessment at that time. If you do not enter work before the submission deadline, you will not receive an evaluation for this assignment, nor will you be allowed to evaluate your classmates' work. So, please get started on this assignment right away, even before viewing the Week 4 videos and quiz (which are not required for this assignment, and which have a later Hard Deadline).

You can create and save multiple drafts any time during the submission process; your draft enters the system to be graded only when you click the "Submit for grading" button. (This means that if you haven't clicked "Submit for grading" by the deadline, your saved draft will not be evaluated, so please be sure to click it!) Even after submitting, you can return to your assignment, make changes and "Re-submit for grading" anytime up until the deadline. You will need to check the box "In accordance with the Honor Code..." to activate the Submit button.

Next week, we will continue with the peer assessment phase of this assignment. You will be asked to review five other students' assignments, and five other students will review your assignment too. Some general information about peer assessment is available here, and we will provide you with more details next week. Remember that you must participate fully in BOTH the assignment AND the peer assessment in order to receive credit for your work.

Background for the Assignment

For this assignment, a simple random sample of 1,500 observations was selected from the 18,462 submissions of at least one of the pre-course survey and background knowledge quiz. Our data are the pre-course survey responses and answers to the background knowledge quiz for these 1,500 observations.

The key pdf document for this assignment is posted here. That document gives more information about the data being considered, including five tables and four figures (plots). For this assignment, please use only the information provided in that document. (We won't be providing the data for now, partially because we don't want to disadvantage students who are not learning R, though we might post more details later.)

(As an aside, we note that the background survey also asked for what region of the world you live in. The possible response options were all continents, and several of you told us that where you live wasn't represented. We apologize for that; we simply used the standard Coursera regions, but now we see that they should be appropriately modified and expanded -- which we will do next time. Because of this concern, we decided not to use this question for the assignment. But for those of you who are curious about your fellow students: we have students enrolled from every continent (except Antarctica); 37% of respondents indicated they were from North America, 28% indicated Europe, 22% indicated Asia, 7% indicated South America, 4% indicated Africa, and 3% indicated Australia. And other students told us they were from Central America, New Zealand, and some Pacific islands, too.)

The Actual Assignment

Your assignment is to use the information in the pdf document of tables and figures mentioned above to answer the following four questions. Use the material and statistical knowledge that we have covered in Weeks 1 and 2 of the MOOC; your answers are NOT expected to address material from Weeks 3 and 4 (nor anything we'll be covering later). Please focus on the most important features of the data that you observe, and be concise and to the point since you are allowed only a limited number of words to state your answer.