Stat 100 Project 1
Purpose: To use a spreadsheet program to calculate several basic statistical quantities from sample data and to display the data in several types of graphs.
Reading: Text, sections 2.4 and 2.5 for measures of center and variation and section 2.3 for graphical displays.
Submit: Turn in a printout of the worksheet named “Output,” containing the graphs and plots, including the box plot,the pie chart, the dot plot, the density histogram, the frequency histogram, and the stem-leaf display. Also turn in your answers to the questions at the end of this assignment. Please do not submit a copy of these instructions; your instructor already has them. A one or two page submission is what is wanted.
Instructions: The following assumes that you are running Windowsand have Microsoft Office installed. If you do not have Microsoft Office on your computer, you may use a computer in one of the WAM labs or the OWL lab.
It is perfectly OK to get help if you get stuck, but remember that only the driver learns.
We recommend that you setup a Stat100 directory on your personal computer where you can save the project files. Some of the spreadsheet files might be useful to you after Stat 100.
Click on “Excel” under spreadsheet in the table where you found these instructions and select “Open with” when the dialog appears. This should open your spreadsheet program and load the proper file.
Return to your browser and click on “All” under Data and open it. This file contains the data for this project. The file will be loaded in Excel, but you might not see this until you switch to your spreadsheet program.When you do, you should see five columns of data. Select all of the data (hold the ctrl key and type a in Windows). All of the data should become highlighted. Now copy the data to the clipboard (ctrl-c in Windows).
Switch to the main spreadsheet (ctrl-tab). You should see a number of worksheet tabs at the bottom of the window. Click on “Input” if it is not already active. Click in cell a1 (the green cell in the upper left-hand corner) and paste the data that you just copied into the worksheet (ctrl-v in Windows). You should see the five columns of numbers appear in this worksheet. If you make an error, simply type ctrl-z to undo the last command. Then try again.
Click in cell h1 (the other green cell on the first row) and type “Stat 100 Scores” followed by your name (all on one line).
Printout:Click on the tab “Output” (lower part of the window).You can see that we have already setup a number of graphs and charts of the data you entered. We will show you how you create charts in the later projects.
Click the round Windows logo (or on the menu item “file”) at the upper left. Then click on “print preview” (or “print” then “print preview”) to see what your output looks like. You should see a single page containing six different charts depicting the grades for students in a Stat 100 course. Make sure that the title of the box plot chart has your name in it.(If you only see one chart, close print preview and then click away from the chart to deselect it and try again.)
If the right hand side of the page appears to be cut off, you will need to set the page format to landscape. Click on “Page Setup” in the Excelprint preview view. You may also have to click on “Fit to” one page wide and one page high under “Scaling.”NO CREDIT WILL BE GRANTED FOR IMPROPERLY-PRINTED FIGURES.
Assuming everything appears to be satisfactory, exit the print preview mode and print the single page (you do not have to print in color). Be sure that you only printing the active sheet, otherwise you may waste a lot of paper.
Finally, save the file to your hard drive (“File” or Windows logo and then “Save As.”)
Questions: Answer the following questions, being concise and clear:
1. What are the mean, median, and standard deviation for the Exam 1 scores?
(This information can be found in the yellow-highlighted region of the “BoxPlot” worksheet.)
2. Briefly describe what these quantities measure.
3. As you can see from this exercise, there are many ways of depicting data besides in a tabular format. The one you might use would depend on what you are trying to communicate. Which chart do you think communicates this particular data the most effectively, and why? (There is no wrong answer here, but your reasons should be clear.)
4. Suppose you were handed a piece of paper with 50 scores (between 0 and 100) on it. Further suppose you did not have access to a computer and had to summarize the data by hand. Which chart would you use and why?