• What: A comprehensive examination with special emphasis on chapters 16-21 PLUS topics covered in class.
• When: Thursday, December 18, 8:00-10:00 a.m.
• Where: Olin 320
• Format: The final examination will be a closed-book examination. You may however, use the note cards you prepared for the previous exams. In addition, you may use the handout/document sheets, "Statistical Hypothesis Testing" and "Statistical Inference for Means and Proportions," with any notes of your own written on them--and you may write on both sides. You may use your calculator. Statistical tables will also be provided.

• Much of the exam will focus on topics covered since the last exam:
  • Inference about a population mean
  • Two-sample problems
  • Inference about a population proportion
  • Comparing two proportions
  • Two categorical variables: The chi-square test
  • Inference for regression
    (The complicated formulas for confidence intervals and so on will not be tested.)
• Some of the exam questions will relate to material we learned earlier:
  • Exploring data: variables and distributions
  • Exploring data: relationships
  • Sampling and sampling distributions
  • Experiments
  • Confidence interval basics
  • Statistical hypothesis testing/tests of significance

Suggested study and preparation:

• Review the summaries at end of each section of the text.
• Go over the review sections for Parts I, II, and III and "Statistical Thinking Revisited" at the end of the book (pp. 630-632).
• Work some of the odd-numbered review exercises.
• Make sure that you know and understand the terminology and notation we use in probability and statistics.
• In particular, be able to distinguish parameters, statistics, variables, values, etc., and denote them appropriately.
• Review homework problems and problems worked in class.
• Review old exams.
• Be prepared to demonstrate statistical thinking in context.
• Make notes that tell you under what conditions the formulas and procedures we have learned may be applied.
• Know how to use Table A (standard normal probabilities), Table B (random digits), Table C (critical t values), and Table E (critical chi-square values), or be prepared to do the equivalent on your calculator.
• Be prepared to calculate and interpret confidence intervals for parameters.
• Be prepared to demonstrate your mastery of the procedure for statistical hypothesis testing/tests of significance. (Caution: The .htm file changed alpha to "a," sigma to "s", and the inequality symbol to superscript 1.)

Last updated 12/8/03