DSC 330 - Business Statistics

Assignment 1

Practical matters

• Make sure you have been placed in a group and know how to contact fellow group members.
• Make sure your LCB network account in the Business Technology Center is active.
• Look at the handout "Homework Example" (available at the course web-site) which will give you a good idea of how best to present homework. You can use any software package to write up homework - I recommend Microsoft Word, copying and pasting relevant graphs and tables from SPSS as needed.

Reading

Pages xiii-xx (Preface, Introduction), 238-241 (Appendix A.1 - SPSS help), and 277-278 (Appendix D - Mathematics refresher) of the textbook (available from the University Bookstore).

Exercises to turn in

• Due by beginning of class on Monday, week 2.
• Do the exercises in your group, and turn in just one write-up.

Save the CARS1 data file to a "DSC330" folder in your home directory and start SPSS (Start > Programs > Business Course Software > SPSS for Windows > SPSS 14.0 for Windows). I recommend for all assignments that when you start SPSS, you change the "Options" to display variable names (in alphabetical order) rather than labels in dialog boxes, to show variable names rather than labels in output tables, and to display small numbers in tables without using scientific notation. Then open the data file you just saved and answer the following questions:

• Exercise A.1 (page 267) - 5 points,
• Exercise A.3 (page 267) - 3 points,
• Exercise A.5 (page 268) - 2 points.

See the handout "Homework Example" as an example of the sort of write-up you are expected to hand in for this assignment (and all other assignments). The example works the following review questions. (See SPSS help #1 on page 238 for tips on creating a write-up.)

Review exercises not to be turned in

Usually, this section will suggest exercises you can do to review material. These will be exercises from the text-book with some brief answers you can check in the back of the book. For this assignment only, to give you an idea of how best to present homework, complete answers to the questions below are given in the handout "Homework Example".

• Exercise A.2 (page 267),
• Exercise A.4 (page 268),
• Exercise A.6 (page 268).