Rubric for Semester Project

Assessment will be based on the presentation and the final report. Your group itself, your class peers, and your professor will all provide feedback on the success of the project.

Evaluation Criteria

The following guidelines will be used to evaluate reports.¹

An A-range paper will:

• show careful, creative, and critical thinking about the topic, questions, and results.
  
• include appropriate references.
• be clear, concise, well-organized, and engaging.
• describe and interpret all important findings in the context of the study.
• be understandable to someone who has finished Math 158 and received a B or better.
• use all technical terms correctly and have informative, carefully-crafted plots that are well-annotated (all plots must have captions).
• show exemplary understanding of the statistical methods we have discussed.
• be grammatically correct.
• look professional with no superfluous R code.
• follow all instructions.

A B-range paper will:

• usually display careful, creative, and critical thinking but might have a few lapses.
  
• be described accurately by at least 2 of the following descriptors: clear, concise, well-organized, and engaging.
• be mostly understandable to someone who has finished Math 158 and received a B or better.
• describe and interpret all important statistical findings in the context of the study.
• show a solid understanding of the statistical methods we have discussed.
• have references that are possibly incomplete.
• have plots that are good but not great (e.g., axes could be better labeled).
• usually use technical terms correctly.
• have grammar that is usually correct, with maybe only a couple errors.
• have only a few typos.
• have very few lapses with respect to superfluous R code.
• follow all instructions.

A C-range paper might have some of the following problems:

• the included plots are problematic (e.g., uninformative axis labels) or barely relevant.
• no display of consistent careful and critical thinking.
  
• no appropriate references.
• technical terms that are used incorrectly several times.
• be described accurately by only 1 of the following descriptors: clear, concise, well-organized, and engaging.
• be mostly inaccessible to someone who has finished Math 158 and received a B or better.
• no description/interpretation of important statistical findings in the context of the study.
• an incomplete understanding of the statistical methods discussed in class.
• a paper in need of basic editing: it may contain several typos and/or grammatical errors.

An unsatisfactory paper (D or F) might be incomplete or might have many of the problems that affect the C-range papers.

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1. Adapted from Christina Knudson, Department of Mathematics, University of St. Thomas, Stat 333↩︎