HI6007 Analyzing the Relationship Between Preparation Time and Exam Marks: Group Assignment

HOLMES INSTITUTE
FACULTY OF HIGHER EDUCATION
HI6007 Group Assignment
Due End of Week/Lecture 10
WORTH 30%
(Maximum 5 students in the group)
"This is an applied assignment, not a research assignment. You have to show that you
understand the principles and techniques taught in this course. Therefore, you are
expected to show all your workings, and all problems must be completed in the format
taught in class, the lecture notes or prescribed text book. Any problems not done in the
prescribed format will not be marked, regardless of the ultimate correctness of the
answer."
Instructions:
 Your assignment must be submitted in WORD format only!
 When answering questions, wherever required, you should copy/cut and paste the
Excel output (e.g., plots, regression output etc) to show your working/output.
 Submit your assignment through Safe-Assign in the course website, under the
Assignments and due dates, Assignment Final Submission before the due date.
 You are required to keep an electronic copy of your submitted assignment to re-submit,
in case the original submission is failed and/or you are asked to resubmit.
 Please check your Holmes email prior to reporting your assignment mark regularly for
possible communications due to failure in your submission.
Important Notice:
All assignments submitted undergo plagiarism checking; if found to have cheated, all
involving submissions would receive a mark of zero for this assessment item.

Please read below information carefully and respond all questions listed.
1. Many Holmes Institute instructors believe that students need to spend at least 2 hours
studying outside of class for every hour of lecture. They believe that the number of hours’
students study to prepare for the exam affect students’ marks significantly. As opposed,
few of the lecturers believe that the number of preparation hours do not essentially affect
students’ marks while some other factors are to be considered. To study the relationship
between the preparation time spent by each student (in hours) for the exam and the
reported mark, a sample of 100 students were selected randomly from a large statistics
class. The data are stored in the file named “ASSIGNMENTDATA” in the course website.
Answer below 9 questions:
a. What type of survey method could be used? Explain your answer.
A cross-sectional survey would be efficient since the research involves collection of data which are
obtained at a specific time for a sample population.
b. What sampling method could be used to select the sample? Explain your answer.
Probability sampling:
Use of Probability sampling would ensure that every member of the population (students in
Holmes Institute) have got an equal probability of inclusion in the sample and hence remove
biasness and increase accuracy of the research results.
c. On the basis of given data, determine the dependent and independent variables
we should use, and why? Also, identify the data type(s) for each variable.
The independent variable is preparation time since it is the variable hypothesized to influence the
students’ marks. As such, marks variable is the dependent variable since it is the variable that will
be affected hypothetically given change in preparation time.
d. What kind of issues we may face in collecting the data using this type of survey
method? List and explain two cases.
Non-response
Some of the respondents may choose to not respond to some of the survey questions which may
lead to the issue of missing data consequently affecting the data analysis results.
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Instrumentation problem
During preparation of questionnaires there might arise the problem of instrumentation where the
survey questions might not be exactly relevant in collection of the desired information, for
instance given the fact that students take more than one exam in the Institution, time taken for
preparation for the exams might differ hence use of a single exam’s time of preparation might not
be the right instrument for data collection.
e. Using 8 classes and intervals of 20 - 30, 30 - 40, etc. for both of the variables
selected in question 3, develop a distribution table including class intervals,
frequency, relative frequency and cumulative relative frequency for each variable.
Then, draw frequency histogram, relative frequency histogram and cumulative
relative frequency histogram for each variable. Also, Comment on the shape of
frequency histogram for each variable and provide reason(s) for your comment.
Preparation time
20-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80-89 90-100
0
5
10
15
20
25
Frequency
Total
Figure 1: Frequency of preparation time
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