Connecting students to knowledge
and its application
Southern Utah University
Lynn White, Ph.D.
Statistics Class
Comprehensive Finals
Version 1: This exam has 100 multiple choice-questions and covers the entire semester's worth of material. All 100 questions will be derived from the questions at the end of each chapter in your book. There are about 500 questions there, and most of the questions are not in multiple-choice format. I will covert them for the test. The good news is that by the time you take this version of the final, you will have taken about 25 quizzes... which means you will have seen about 175 multiple choice questions that could be on the test. To prepare for the final, at a minimum you should study all your quizzes AND the end-of-chapter questions.
This test will be administered on Canvas at the testing center during finals week. There is no time limit.
What to expect
Version 2: This exam is 50 multiple-choice questions long and covers the entire semester's worth of material. The test is open notes/book (you can use any PRINTED material you want) with no time limit. These questions will be new (never before seen) questions. They will not be definitional or factual type questions that you can simply look up in your book. They will be conceptual questions that test your understanding of stats. For example, I might describe a hypothetical study and ask you to identify the independent and dependent variables and the name of the test that should be used to analyze the data. To prepare for this final, at a minimum you should review your quizzes and the end-of-chapter questions. Ask yourself whether you understand why each answer is correct, not simply whether you can recall the answer.
This test will be administered on Canvas at the testing center during finals week. There is no time limit.
Which version should I Take?
This is a difficult choice. To make it easier, you can take both and I will count whichever test you score highest on. Just be sure to leave yourself enough time. If you wait until the last day of finals and you don't do well on one test, you may not have enough time to squeeze a second final in before the test-taking window closes.
Some Calming Thoughts?
Even though there are approximately 500 end-of-chapter questions, these are not 500 completely separate, non-overlapping questions. For example, there are only so many ways someone can ask a question about sampling error. I have tried to come up with as many of these ways as possible and include them in the book. That way, if you know the chapter questions, you will know how to answer all the questions on the final. Just make sure you know BOTH the book questions and all the questions on your quizzes.