First quarter test this week

The test will be multiple choice on Blackboard.  You are allowed to consult your notes. 

The test covers the following:

1. Level of measurement - (types of variables) - you should be able to determine whether a variable is nominal, ordinal or interval.
2. What is data -- you should know what data is for our purposes -- that it is made up of variables and cases.  What are variables?  What are cases?  Know how to find out how many cases there are in a dataset.
3. Measures of central tendency: mean (average), median and mode.  Know what they are and how to calculate them in Excel.  Know how the median can behave differently than the mean. 
   
4. Standard deviation - know what it measures, and what it tells you.
5. Rates.  Why do we use them rather than just simple counts or frequencies?  How do we calculate them?  What problems can arise if we calculate rates by place,
   
6. Facility with Excel.  You should be comfortable opening data in Excel and creating tables (CTRL-T) based on the data.
7. Using Pivot Tables to obtain counts, totals, and averages of one variable by different categories of another variable (remember the Major League Baseball team payrolls? the payrolls were sums of player salaries by team.)  
8. Naming ranges of cells and then using functions to calculate summary statistics of these ranges of cells, e.g. =AVERAGE(), =MEDIAN(), =STDEV()
9. Creating new variables based on existing variables.  (Remember that you needed to do this to create crime rates.)