AS.440.605 – STATISTICS

AS.440.605 – STATISTICS

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

1. PARRETT

Group Assignment

You have been hired by the National Football League (NFL) to test the coin that they will use for the coin toss in next year’s Super Bowl.  The NFL wants to ensure that the coin is a fair coin, meaning that the coin is such that the probability of heads equals the probability of tails equals 50 percent.  They also want to test whether the coin would remain fair if an unscrupulous person or persons somehow managed to add some weight to one side of the coin or the other.

You will be placed in groups of approximately four to five students per group.  I will send an introductory email to each group that will contain the names and email addresses of the members of the group.  Your task as a group is to obtain a quarter and test whether it is fair.  Then, add weight to one side of the quarter and test whether the weighted quarter is fair.  Once your analysis is complete, you then need to write it up in a memorandum comprising no more than four typewritten pages.  I also want to see your raw data and the details of your statistics work, but these should go neatly in an Appendix (the Appendix will not count towards your page quota of four pages).  Throughout, you should use 1.5 line spacing, 12-point Times New Roman font, and 1” margins all around.  Your memorandum should consist of the following sections:

• Executive Summary – This is a short, one paragraph summary that pulls together all of the information in the below sections in a very concise way so as to give the reader a “just the essentials” summary of the study.

• Introduction – Introduce the study. Provide the background as to why the study is being done.  You can also use this section to describe how the rest of the memorandum is organized (e.g., “The layout of this memorandum is as follows.  Section 2 discusses the study design, . . .”).

• Study Design – Describe here how you generated your data. Be specific and be clear.

• Data – Describe and summarize your data here. You should use some of the techniques you learned in Weeks 1 and 2 to summarize your data.

• Empirical Method and Results – Describe here the statistical method(s) you are using to analyze the data and then present the results of the data analysis. Don’t get into the weeds, save those for the Appendix.  Here, you want to succinctly relay the results of the analysis using just the essential statistical information.  At a minimum, I would think the reader would want to know the specific hypotheses tested and the p-values associated with those hypotheses.

• Conclusion

• Appendix

I am of a very strong opinion that less is just about always better, so while you are free to use four pages for your memorandum, do not feel obliged to do so.  Also, please be neat, clear, and concise, in both the memorandum and with your Appendix work. 

The purpose of this assignment is threefold.  First, I want you to gain some experience doing statistics from the ground up.  Second, I want you to gain experience writing about statistics, a task that is much, much harder than it looks.  Lastly, I want you to gain experience working in groups, as there are very few jobs these days in which you work completely on your own.

One last thing I want to mention is that the course material through Chapter 9 is all that you need to perform well on this assignment.  You do not need to calculate probabilities of Type II Errors.  You should, however, convince me that your results are robust by, say, considering more than just one sample size.  Such robustness checks are very common in professional empirical work.

The Group Assignment is worth 100 points.  Below is a rough grading rubric:

Your group’s deliverable, which is the memorandum with appendix, should be emailed to me by 11:59 PM EST on Thursday November 26.  Late memorandums will receive a grade of zero.

Best of luck, and I look forward to reading your memoranda!

√FALL2020