STA/OPR 9750 - Course Syllabus

Instructor

• Professor Michael Weylandt
• Department of Information Systems & Statistics
• Zicklin School of Business
• Baruch College, CUNY

Course Meetings

Lecture / Lab Sessions

• Virtual (Synchronous Online)
• Thursdays 6:05pm-9:00pm
  • Zoom link provided via Brightspace

Office Hours

• In-Person
  • Baruch Main Campus (1 Bernard Baruch Way)
  • Newman Vertical Campus (NVC) 11-246
  • Mondays 4:30-5:30pm
  • Subject to periodic cancellation (communicated via Brightspace)
• Virtual:
  • Thursdays 4:30pm-5:30pm
  • Zoom link provided via Brightspace

Grading

• 24% Weekly Pre-Assignments
  • 3% Each (best eight of ten: lowest two dropped)
  • Submission via Brightspace
• 36% Mini Projects
  • 7% Each (four total)
  • 2% per Peer Feedback (Meta-Review)
• 40% Course Project
  • 5% Proposal
  • 5% Mid-term Check-In
  • 10% Final Presentation
  • 7.5% Final Report
  • 12.5% Individual Evaluation

Opportunities for Extra Credit: Several opportunities for extra credit will be made available. These include:

1. Participation in Course Discussion Board (Piazza)
2. Correction of errors in published course materials (via Github pull request)
3. Submission of homework from other STA courses completed using R. (Note that the assignment must not ordinarily require R: this is extra credit.)

Final course grades will be curved in accordance with relevant program, departmental, school, and college policies.¹

Regrading Policy

If you feel an assignment has been improperly graded, please contact the instructor by private message on the course discussion board within 48 hours of the graded assignment being returned. Note that the instructor will regrade the assignment de novo, so your grade may be adjusted upwards or downwards.

Late Work Policy

This course has many moving pieces and late work will not generally be accepted. Specifically, late submission slows down the peer review cycle used in thise course. All assignments can be submitted multiple times on Brightspace, so you are strongly encouraged to submit early and to submit often. Students are also encouraged to load the course deadlines file into their personal calendar to better track key course dates.

Individual exceptions will be made i) with prior written approval of instructor; or ii) ex post with written note from the Office of the Dean of Students.

Tentative Course Schedule

Week	Lecture Date	Topics	Pre-Assignment	In-Class Lab	Mini Projects	Additional Notes
1	August 29, 2024	Course Overview R and RStudio git and GitHub Basic Principles of “Clean Code”	None	Lab #1	Mini Project #0 assigned. Due September 11st at 11:45pm
2	September 5, 2024	Markdown & Quarto GitHub Pages Getting Help Course Project Overview	PA #02	Lab #2
3	September 12, 2024	First Steps with R: Vectors Subsetting Control Flow Function Calls	PA #03	Lab #3	Mini Project #1 assigned. Due September 25th at 11:45pm	Peer Feedback on Mini Project #0 due September 18th at 11:45pm.
4	September 19, 2024	Tidy Data Manipulation I: Single Table Operations Factors Dates & Times	PA #04	Lab #4
5	September 26, 2024	Multi-Table Operations (Joins) Pivots Working with Missing Data	PA #05	Lab #5	Mini Project #2 assigned. Due October 23rd at 11:45pm	Peer Feedback on Mini Project #1 due October 2nd at 11:45pm. No class next week (October 3rd - Rosh Hashanah)
6	October 10, 2024	Project Proposal Presentations				In-Class Project Proposals
7	October 17, 2024	Plotting I: Static Plots	PA #07	Lab #7		Peer Feedback on Project Proposal Presentations due October 16th at 11:45pm.
8	October 24, 2024	Plotting II: Advanced ggplot2 Interactive Plots	PA #08	Lab #8	Mini Project #3 assigned. Due November 13th at 11:45pm	Peer Feedback on Mini Project #2 due October 30th at 11:45pm.
9	October 31, 2024	Data Import	PA #09	Lab #9
10	November 7, 2024	Mid-Semester Project Presentation				Project Mid-Semester Check-In
11	November 14, 2024	Elements of Web Scraping	PA #11	Lab #11	Mini Project #4 assigned. Due December 4th at 11:45pm
12	November 21, 2024	Strings & Regular Expressions Classical Statistical Modeling in R	PA #12	Lab #12	Peer Feedback on Mini Project #3 due November 20th at 11:45pm.	Peer Feedback on Mid-Semester Project Presentation due November 27th at 11:45pm No class next week (November 28th - Thanksgiving)
13	December 5, 2024	Predictive Modeling in R	PA #13	Lab #13
14	December 12, 2024	Final Presentations			Peer Feedback on Mini Project #4 due December 11th at 11:45pm.

All syllabus provisions subject to change with suitable advance notice.

Footnotes

1. Theoretically, this may result in scores equivalent to an A in an un-curved course receiving a lower grade in this course. In practice, the instructor will design course assessments to induce a range of scores and does not anticipate “down-curving” happening.