If a problem asks you to do a statistical test, EXPLAIN CLEARLY what
the null hypothesis H_0 is, what test you used, what the P-value is, and
whether the data is significant, highly significant, or neither. If you
use SAS, include this as part of your answer in part (i) below.
USING SAS:
SAS PROGRAMS AND ASSIGNMENTS:
If you use SAS to do a homework problem, then the SAS program and
output must be included as part of the assignment.
ALWAYS INCLUDE YOUR NAME in a title statement in your SAS
programs, so that your name will appear at the top of each output page.
All homeworks MUST BE ORGANIZED in the following order:
(i) First, your answers to all the problems in the homework.
(ii) Second, all SAS programs that you used to obtain the
output for any of the problems. If possible, similar problems should be
done with the same SAS program. (In other words, write one SAS program
for several problems if that makes things easier. Better yet would be
one SAS program for the entire homework with appropriate title
statements to separate the problems in your output.)
(iii) Third, all output for all the SAS programs in the
previous step.
If the answer to a problem requires a table or a plot that you need
to refer to in your answers, add page numbers to your homework and make
references in part (i) by page number, such as ``The scatterplot
for part (b) is on page #X in the SAS output below.''
Alternatively, you could Xerox a page or two of your SAS output and
include it in part (i) along with annotations as well as in
part (iii), but references by page number will usually be enough.
MAKE SURE that part (iii) of your homework (SAS output) has consecutive
page numbers, so that it is easy to find ``page #X'' in your output.
If you use several different SAS programs for your output (which is often
easier), then write your own page numbers on the output if necessary and
refer to those page numbers in part (i) of your homework.
SAS programs should be structured, or have enough comments, so that
someone who looks at the program a year from now can easily tell what the
program is doing. It is even better if descriptive comments can be put in
title (or title2 or title3) statements, since
these will appear in the SAS output as well as in the SAS program. SAS
programs may be graded for understandability.
SAS Online Printed Manuals:
These have more detailed descriptions about what SAS procedures do,
the options that are available, and the underlying statistical theory than
the online help files in PC Windows SAS. (There is also a detailed manual
for using Proc IML.)
See SAS Online Manuals for
more details.
Some useful references:
Using the SAS Windowing Environment: A Quick Tutorial,
L. Hatcher, SAS Institute Press, 2001.
Applied Linear Statistical Models, 4th ed., John Neter,
M. Kutner, C. J. Nachtsheim, and W. Wasserman, Irwin/McGraw Hill, 1999.
The Little SAS Book, Lora Delwiche & Susan Slaughter,
SAS Institute Press, 1995.
Design and analysis of experiments, 2nd ed., Douglas
Montgomery, John Wiley & Sons, 1984. (Good for multiple-comparison
procedures.)
A Handbook of Statistical Analyses using SAS, B.S.
Everitt and G. Der, Chapman & Hall, London, 1996.
Applied Multivariate Statistical Analysis. 5th ed., R.
A. Johnson and D. W. Wichern, Prentice Hall, 2002.
Good books for reviewing elementary statistics:
R. L. Iman, A Data-Based Approach to Statistics.
Duxbury Press, 1994.
A. J. Tamhane and D. D. Dunlop, Statistics and Data Analysis
from Elementary to Intermediate, Prentice-Hall, 2000.
Both books have been used as textbooks for Math 320 at WashU. The
second book (Tamhane et al) is drier but deeper.
Click here for Prof. Sawyer's home page:
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