MAST10010: Data Analysis 1

10 Weekly online quizzes each contributes 1% to your final grade (totally 10%), 2 written assignments each contributes 5%, 1 lab test held in your week 12 computer lab class (10%) and a 3-hour written examination in the examination period (70%).

The weekly online quiz shouldn't be a problem, you will be given three attempts and only the highest one will be counted. The questions are mostly MCQs and one or two calculation & filling in numbers questions. There will be 11 quizzes in total and only your best 10 grades will be counted.

Two assignments are handed out in week 5 and week 8, the first one due in one week, the other due after the midsemester break. They both need to be completed as a word document and all the graphs need to be produced by MiniTab, there's a five-page maximum length but it depends on the tutor to decide whether or not to take mark off for overly long assignments -- from my experience most are quite lenient. Both assignments are not hard in the terms of contents but they do need you to put in some time, the first one has more short answer questions (including design a study) and the second one has more calculations.

The lab test is basically testing how much you know about how to use MiniTab in this subject, you are allowed to bring any written material (including the lab sheets) into the test, but no calculators or electronic devices. There are 3-4 pages of questions asking you to either use MiniTab to analyse the data and draw conclusions or explain the output from it. It's kinda hard to prepare at the last minutes, but even if you didn't do well in the test, it's just 10%, just bring yourself up to speed before the final exam.

The final exam allowed you to bring in 2 double sided A4 cheat sheets, please start making them as early as possible (Sharon recommended to start from midsemester break) and cram all the things you think you will need into them. The final exam itself is quite straight forward, if you are comfortable with all the tutorial questions and past year exam papers, you should be fine. However, the amount of questions is quite huge, last semester's booklet had about 30 pages including answer space and there were a lot of short answer questions, I merely finished at last 2 or 3 minutes while some of my friends still had questions left.


Overall I think this subject is a simplified version of second year version statistics subject MAST20005 Statistics, it falls under the math category yet doesn't need much heavily quantative/proof based math stuff, it is more on the practical (applied) side. Surely it's not a no-brainer WAM booster, but if you put in time and some hard work, you will do well.

This is a subject that mostly taken by Biomedicine students or Science students who tends to do bio/chem related majors, the mathematical pre-knowledge required is not intense, if you were doing ok in VCE Math Method it should be fine. If you find it hard to remember about these it's also not a big problem, there will be an assumed knowledge page on LMS with both videos and practical questions sheets(with answers) on topics like probability, random variables, normal distributions for you to review necessary math concepts at the start of the semester. As an (intended) math major, I chose this subject to fulfill the "at least 5 level 1 science subjects" requirements, it was actually the one I put least time in last semester yet the highest in results.

Yes, with screen capture.

Ms Sharon Gunn

The subject starts with how to evaluate/design a study, Sharon will go through the methodology (how to design a study to get meaningful and reliable data, how to avoid possible bias.etc, how to randomize a study by MiniTab), then it goes into analysing the data gained from study by using MiniTab to draw different graphical displays (boxplot, dotplot, bar chart and so on...). Then we will look into discrete and continuous random variables, their distributions, expectation (mean), variance, standard deviation; also normal distribution and normal approximation of binomial distribution, this part is basically the same/slight extension of the same knowledge in high school. After that you will use 2-3 weeks to learn how to modelling the data by MiniTab, determine the sample distribution, estimate sample/population mean, variance, sd with certain confidence level. Then you will use another 2-3 weeks on hypothesis testing - determine whether a hypothetical value for the sample mean or proportion is reasonable, also how to compare two means or two proportions. The remaining topics include different models (single mean/separate mean/regression), their assumptions and how to choose between them, there is also a small topic on Chi-Square Test at the end for comparing several means (>2). There will be 1 or 2 revision lectures in Week 12 depending on teaching schedule of the subject, Sharon will discuss some most asked topics & questions students sent to her and some of the revision questions as well.

The contents in the first few weeks of this subject are quite light and can be a bit boring (though Sharon is definitely an enthusiastic lecturer), but please do pay attention as it goes into estimating and hypothesis testing, you will need actually put some work in order to fully understand the topics. There are exercises after each topic's lecture slide, Sharon will discuss some in the class, for those she does not I strongly recommend you try finishing them after class. The question booklet also contains several of questions on each topic, if you have time, try them before attending your practice class next week as well.

Yes, 5 past exam papers from 04 to 06 and additional 3 pages of revision questions, all with answers provided.

There will be a tutorial question sheet available each weekend for next week's practice class, the first hour is just normal math tutorials where you sit with 3 or 4 students together and work on these problems, some tutors will go through all the questions on the whiteboard at the end of the class, some will just response to your questions during the class and let you work out the answers by yourself. There's no answer sheet given in the class (like in Calculus 2 or Linear Algebra). In the second hour you will be in the computer lab with another class, one of the tutors will give demonstration on contents in this week's lab, then you'll need to work on the lab sheet , you can ask your friends or the tutors if you get stuck, some of the lab sheets may seems too long to complete in class but I highly recommend completing them in your spare time -- leave them all until before the lab test in week 12 would be painful, though not practically difficult, they are quite time consuming and irritating.

The software mainly used in this subject is MiniTab (which can be downloaded freely from math department's software page), there will be two week's lab using StatPlay but nothing is under examination. Throughout the semester both the computer lab and sometimes in lecture you will be taught how to use it and read the output from it, it's very important to get on top of this whole MiniTab thing since most of assignment questions & lab test & final exam are based on using it or interpret its output.

Also I don't suggest take the practice class on Monday, since usually Sharon would not be able to finish the lecture slides from last week on time, taking practice class early in the week may possibly result in doing problems that you have not learn yet.

4 Out of 5

Prescribed Texts are Mind on Statistics (4th/5th edition) by Utts and Heckard or Into Stats (3rd or 4th edition) by DeVeaux, Velleman & Bock, bought the first one but never opened it, so not really required, there are several copies held by the Uni library if you need to read them. There is a tutorial/lab problem booklet handed out in the first two lectures (pdf version available on LMS).

3 x one hour lectures per week, 1 x one hour practice class per week, 1 x one hour computer laboratory class per week.

2015, Semester 2

H1 (93)