4  Assignments

The three types of assignments required of you in this course are:

  1. A semester-long project
  2. An “observational studies in action” presentation
  3. Four “labs” using R to perform and present analyses.

4.1 Deadlines

All deadlines will be found on the Course Calendar.

4.2 The Course Project

You will do a small observational study as a capstone project for the course. Your deliverables include:

  1. a proposal which you will submit for my approval before proceeding further.
  2. an update verifying that you have the data and are proceeding appropriately.
  3. a final presentation to the class about your results accompanied by an abstract, and by Quarto and HTML files that describe the work you did.

Instructions for the Course Project are available here.

4.3 An “Observational Studies in Action” presentation

During the semester, you will be responsible for presenting the methods and results of an observational study from the literature that uses propensity scores. Your choice of manuscript must be accepted in advance by Dr. Love. After you’ve claimed a study, you’ll give a presentation of it, and you’ll also act as “second reviewer” for one of the studies selected by your colleagues. Some presentations will be in class, and others will be recorded.

Instructions for the OSIA work are available here.

4.4 Lab Assignments

Four lab assignments require you to do some analyses (using R and Quarto) on data we will provide to you.

Details on the lab assignments are available in the Labs section of our website.

4.5 A Note on Feedback

500 is a very different course from 431-432 in terms of the “hands on” assistance that I make available to you as you’re working on a lab. In particular, I’m not going to review your code to be sure you’re going in the right direction, even though I understand some of you have come to expect that from 431-432.

Instead, we discuss the homework in class and we provide a detailed answer sketch after the fact. So if you have questions, please feel free to send them to us at 500-help at case dot edu, or ask about them in office hours, but what we are likely to say to anything we cannot resolve quickly for you (or think is worthy of deeper discussion as a group) is:

  1. That sounds like an excellent question to bring up on Thursday in class, and
  2. We’re going to let you (and everyone else) flounder a bit between now and our discussion of this homework in class.

4.6 Grading

  • If you complete all deliverables on time, and your project and OSIA presentations are solid, you will receive an A in the course.
    • If you mostly meet that standard but don’t quite (either because more than one thing is late or because you have substantial project problems that linger), either an A or B is possible.
  • This is an advanced graduate school course. I don’t anticipate that anyone who makes a concerted effort will fall below the B standard, as no one has in the past.
  • If you have any concerns, raise them with Dr. Love (email to 500-help is fine) directly as soon as possible.