All

This coursework is:

Individual

1. Report to be submitted Electronically to blackboard
2. Conducting a viva to explain your outcome and how you arrived at the results.

“the time period during which a student may submit a piece of work late without authorisation and have the work capped at 40% [50% at PG level] if passed is 14 calendar days. Work submitted unauthorised more than 14 calendar days after the original submission date will receive a mark of 0%.  These regulations apply to a student’s first attempt at coursework. Work submitted late without authorisation which constitutes reassessment of a previously failed piece of coursework will always receive a mark of 0%.”

Tasks to be undertaken:

This assignment is based on the SAS programming that you completed during lab sessions. However, you are encouraged to look beyond what was covered in this module as this will prepare you as a SAS professional programmer in a real world.

Background.

The university wishes to set up an attendance monitoring system.  You are part of the team involved in identifying what can be achieved with this system.

You are to write a report to show how the various types of user can be assisted in performing their job. A small amount of test data has been supplied to allow you to create some sample output.  Your report will be used as part of the business case for this system.

You are required to :

a)    Write a SAS program to input the supplied spreadsheet data containing student attendance and module marks.

Copies of the spreadsheets can be found in blackboard in the Coursework folder of Teaching Material.

You will find there is a spreadsheet listing student details and for each of 4 modules, there are several spreadsheets containing attendance data and one spreadsheet (total 4) containing student marks.

Create one SAS data set for all the attendance data and one SAS data set for all the student marks. Refer to task 2 to see what data is required.

b)   The data are required by different people within the organisation.

Create SAS output (i.e. reports) for each of the following individuals.  You will need to decide on the information to be included in the report(s) to meet the needs of each type of user.

a.    The Year manager.

The year manager has responsibility for individual student welfare and progression. The year tutor needs to be aware of students who are missing classes. This could be consistently missing the same class and/or students missing for more than one week from all classes. Attendance below 70% on a module is considered problematic. The year tutor requires a list of students who are missing classes each week as the registers are created.

b.    The course leader.

The course leader has overall responsibility for a course and its delivery and will require summary statistics on individual modules (attendance and student marks), individual students (attendance and marks) as well as being responsible for calculating the overall mark for each student’s average mark.

c.    The Department head.

The department head has responsibility for monitoring the student experience and the courses offered. This individual will need to carry out more specific analysis. For example:

a)    To identify modules and students which have above and below average attendance/results.

b)    To identify associations between achievement and attendance,

c)    To identify associations between results and student demographics,

d)    To identify associations between attendance and student demographics.

They will also be responsible for setting the policies used by the department, for example:

a)    in setting an attendance level below which some type of action is required by the year manager (currently 70%). Would a different attendance level help meet the university objective of 50% of students achieving an overall average of 60% over their module marks.

b)    Identifying when modules are too easy or too hard,

c)    Identifying when a module has poor attendance.

They will also be involved in making strategic decisions such as:

a)    Is attendance monitoring worthwhile?

b)    Should students who achieve 39 % in a module be automatically be rounded up to 40%?

c)    Should an overall attendance level be set?

Failure to achieve the level of attendance will result in failing a course overall. Example rules could be:

·         if students attend below 70% in each module, they fail the attendance requirement

·         if students have an average attendance for all modules below 70%, they fail the attendance requirement.

How many students would be removed from the course with each of these policies?

Present your findings in a report, which should state how your SAS reports meet the needs of the specific user types and should include the SAS reports to prove your case.

You should also place all your SAS programs in the appendix.

c)    Prepare for a short viva approximately 10 min. For the viva you will be required to pick your best analysis demonstrate it and run the code.

Important Note:

You must add a title to all of your reports, containing your p-number in addition to the report titles you feel appropriate.

The data supplied is not extensive so you may find some investigations are inconclusive. This is not important, it is identifying the analysis which will gain you credit. The data analyses required range from providing means, standard deviations and ranges through to hypothesis testing and using correlation.

• Complete, fully commented SAS program.
• Report of the output you feel is helpful to the various users.