HFIT-565
Assessment & Evaluation of Health Fitness Parameters
Fall Semester 2008
Dr. Marc Schaeffer
ASSIGNMENT SUBMISSIONS (extremely important)
Assignments MUST be submitted as an e-mail attachment. For any single weekly assignment, neither multiple e-mails of assignment sections, subparts, nor any combination of hard and soft copy will be accepted. In short, please submit one and only one e-mail per assignment. For example, do NOT e-mail part of an assignment on Tuesday and then e-mail another part of the same assignment the next day. If you submit multiple e-mails, I will only score that which arrives first. Hard copy of any sort will NOT be accepted.
I highly advise making use of the assignment checklist in preparation of each assignment
Please also remember to place your name on your assignment submission, and also use the following nomenclature for your attachment:
where:
n = Week of the lecture
in which the assignment was made (the Lecture # appears in the header of each
note set)
f =
your initial for your first name
m = your middle initial,
if you have a middle name
l =
your initial for your last name
xxx = application extension
(applied automatically for most versions of MS Office, unless you are using
a Macintosh with OS 9.x or earlier- then one must manually apply the .xls extension)
As an example for the first week's assignment for Lecture 1, for a student named Beth Ann Kirkland, which has been prepared using Microsoft Excel, the proper name of the attachment should be:
L1BAK.XLS
Please do not expect confirmation to be automatic or instantaneous. Although I monitor my e-mail much of the day and evening, there can be protracted periods when I do not have e-mail access. The closer an assignment deadline (say 30-45 minutes until class time) before you submit the less likely you will obtain a confirmation of receipt until after class has met. I have been operating in this manner since 1997 and have had very few problems. Still, from time-to-time problems will present themselves. Rather than stressing out in the middle of a crisis, call me at 202 885-6277 or leave a voice mail and how I can try to reach you.
If you have not had much or any experience with e-mail attachments, you may want to practice sending me or a friend a trial attachment to make sure that you are comfortable with the procedures. If you are at all anxious about this method. I want to emphasize how important it is to run a practice trial, rather than find yourself in a blind panic just before the first assignment's deadline. I do not want assignment submission to be anxiety provoking, and my intent is for this method to be a convenience. Please contact me as soon as possible if you feel that you need assistance in this area. The best manner to avoid last minute problems is not to wait until the last minute before a submission is due to discover that you have a problem.
As you can see from the Course Grading, your Weekly Assignments constitute 30% of your total grade. By doing well on your assignments you may help yourself in at least two ways. You will have a favorable component for a large proportion of your grade and you will accrue good experience for similar problems on the exams.
Other VERY Important Points
Time Management
You will probably find this course to be extremely time intensive. If you do not believe me, ask someone who has taken it, and you should hear that the average weekly preparation time is about 12 -16 hours per class. You must pace yourself accordingly. If you think that you can wait until the day of class to start the assignment that is due on that day, you will probably not be satisfied with your grade. If at all possible, begin working on each assignment within 24 hours of the class in which the assignment was made.
For most weeks, I suggest the following steps for completing an assignment. Read the problems first, and make brief notes (and/or draw cartoon of the solution) as to how you think you want to solve them. Read the chapter including all margin annotations before trying to solve the problems. In some instances there will be useful tips and assistance in the lecture notes. Although there could be times when you can answer a problem question completely correctly without reading the accompanying chapter, these times will be the exception rather than the rule.
E-mailing Assignments
Attempt to e-mail your assignment as early in the week as possible. If your assignment is the first submitted, it will automatically be awarded an extra 10% credit above your actual score (and you will be notified in your confirmation e-mail that you will receive a point bonus). If after a reasonable time passage (say 2-4 hours during the business day or by noon after a nighttime submission), you still have not received my confirmation of receiving your assignment, you should probably call me to discuss the situation. Unless we have very unusual circumstances, you will probably not ever need to call me. I have received fewer than 10 calls in the last two years, mostly from students who are overly anxious about receiving confirmation before there has been sufficient time for their e-mail to go through. If you have had an abundance of e-mailing experience, you know that the internet has time intervals similar to "rush hour" on the roadways. There can be bottlenecks created by temporary high use periods on the web, and in these high use periods (which are mostly unpredictable), e-mails do not necessarily arrive at their destination within a few seconds or even minutes of executing a send. I find that some of the free emailing sites such as HOTMAIL, YAHOO, etc. are especially vulnerable to delays. Also several free email services provide less free file storage than you will need in this course. You may need to seriously consider using your free AU account. I routinely have my assignment confirmation e-mails returned as being undeliverable from free email services because of insufficient space. Moreover, some assignments, including the exams will probably generate a file that is so large that your free email service will not allow you to transmit it. Please plan now for this eventuality as this is a problem within your control.
Further and more importantly, because we are dealing with technology, it is possible that you could experience technical problems beyond your control. One of the best ways to refrain from getting yourself into a high risk situation for encountering technical problems leading to a missed deadline is to beat any assignment's due date by several hours, or better still, by a day or more. It has been my observation that technical problems seem to affect the same individuals with uncanny regularity and these technical problems also seem to occur with uncanny regularity in the 90 minutes preceding an assignment's due date. Regardless, no late assignments will be accepted. Please do not bother to ask if you can have a time extension on any assignment, but simply be resigned that you can drop your two lowest assignment scores to compute your assignment grade component.
Assignment Content
Common sense is extremely important in the preparation of an assignment. Please number your problems exactly as assigned and display them in this same order from first to last. Probably the most frequent omission I see in Excel solutions is a failure to show one's work. Showing work in Excel takes on a bit of a different dimension than with the use of pencil and paper, but it is actually much easier than traditional pencil and paper, if you know what you are doing. Since Excel has the equivalent of an extremely powerful calculator built in to it, use these built-in functions to solve your problems - by doing so you will leave a trail of evidence (that I can follow and potentially award partial credit when the final result is not correct). In contrast, you will not get much or any credit for displaying numbers in an Excel worksheet without sufficient demonstration of the required intermediate steps and/or explicit assumptions leading to the solution. My description in this paragraph may not allow adequate portrayal for you to fully comprehend this somewhat abstract issue, particularly if you are not very experienced with Excel - I can appreciate this, so please do not fret. I will demonstrate some examples in class, but if you still have questions, please contact me at your earliest convenience.
The next most common problem of omission is neglecting to properly label and identify answers (see examples by clicking here). The use of the assignment answer sheet is directed at minimizing this problem. Nonetheless, for some solutions, explicit clarification on your part may also be necessary to describe the logic of the steps undertaken or the rationale for your choice of statistics. It is almost impossible for a student to supply too much information in a worksheet for their solution. In contrast, many students fail to grasp the intent of supplying an answer sheet that truly ONLY contains the final answer. Many students cannot understand why they cannot simply copy and paste their worksheet solution into the answer sheet. The objective of the answer sheet is to reflect ONLY the bottom line answer and not how it was derived. In contrast, the derivation of the answer belongs on the worksheet. Moreover, neatness and presentation are of near equal importance to solution technique. In fact, a lack of neatness, a lack of presentable display, or a lack of following the rules for assignment submission will result in a hefty penalty of a returned un-scored workbook. You will receive no warnings about following instructions beyond those found on this page, the syllabus, and the check list page.
As previously mentioned, the inclusion of an answer sheet is critically important. Each assignment unless otherwise noted must contain an answer sheet as the FIRST worksheet of the assignment workbook. However, some multi-line answers, including graphs, tables, and statistical outputs will not be amenable to display on the answer sheet. In these instances, the line of the answer sheet should contain a worksheet reference. The example problem solutions (click here) will probably help to elucidate this method, but we will also cover this in class. Failure to display explicit descriptives or test statistics in the answer sheet will always result in a penalty. Similarly any disagreements between answer sheet final answers and solution page final answers will result in a large loss of credit.
As you will soon see, some attempted answers to statistical questions are frequently ambiguous at best. An answer that you supply may not be correct, if you, and only you know what you mean. To avoid ambiguity, one needs to practice a radically different level of communication rigor than is customarily used in some other disciplines. Much of this ambiguity can be reduced by exercising a little more effort to describe steps taken to derive a well-labeled answer.
Document Saving & Re-saving
How many minutes or hours of your time are you willing to sacrifice if you experience a major technical problem with your computer? When working in Excel, it is imperative that you take some precautions. As you make progress on your soft copy assignments, please try to practice reasonable saving/re-saving and back-up procedures. If you save and back-up frequently, you will not lose very much or any work. I suggest that you save your work every few minutes. In this way, you will probably not lose very much work when you encounter a crash or hang. Although I can pretty much guarantee you that you will have some of these awful experiences, unfortunately I cannot tell you when it will happen. Thus, the best policy is to be prepared, by saving and re-saving frequently.
Important Please Read: Every semester for as long as I have taught this course, at least one student, but more frequently two or three students have the extremely unfortunate experience of a total computer failure resulting in a complete loss of stored data. At the end of this course last fall, a student lost her hard drive, including her nearly finished final exam. Whether or not you have sustained such a cataclysm, major computer crises are so common that you must have a plan for minimizing the effects for such devastating circumstances. If this sort of a computer disaster has never happened to you, I promise you that it will, but I cannot predict when this will happen. Please remember that only files on your computer that are without consequence are ones that you can afford to remain without a backup. Plan ahead to make backup files for your assignments and exams, as the complete loss of these files will definitely impact your life in a very negative manner. This means that you need to make a backup each time you make a significant amendment to a file, not simply at the conclusion of your work. Ask yourself how much time do you have to reconstruct lost work. Do you have two months, two minutes, or somewhere in the middle of this range to reconstruct your digital life? Chances are you have closer to two minutes than two months. Put no more at risk than you are willing to reconstruct when your ill-fated computer meltdown occurs. If you can burn CDs, you are in great shape for ease of backup. However, if you must use floppy disks, you can still save an impressive amount if you will WINZIP your data files prior to floppy storage. Please, please, please take the few moments to create backups of your important files used in this course. It also makes good sense to practice good backup habits with all your important files.
E-mailing questions about an assignment (EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!)
During the last offering of this course, on the average, I e-mailed EACH student about 40 times across the 14 class meetings. Thus, I hope that you can see that I am not resistant to e-mailing students, but it is abundantly clear to me that e-mail is at its most useful application when the topic of discussion is as simple as possible. While much of our course content is not intuitively complex, it is still not what I would call simple. Because of this lack of simplicity of course content, I believe that this disqualifies many (if not most) statistical questions from being asked by e-mail.
I would prefer that you not e-mail with ANY ASSIGNMENT QUESTIONS unless you believe that I can answer your question with a yes or a no. Please do not be put off, if I respond by asking you to contact me in real time because your question is too complicated for e-mail. Also waiting to ask your "quick question" until there is a day or less until an assignment is due will probably not allow enough time to obtain the feedback that you want.
I do not wish to impose this restriction to make you feel that I am disinterested in providing help, but I find that I have reduced certainty of what your question is when it is either too general or very complicated, and moreover, I have even less confidence that I can make myself sufficiently clear that you will be able to understand my e-mail response. Because it is easy to become engaged in a multi-hour e-mailing campaign back and forth, this is horribly inefficient and is probably better addressed at least in a telephone conversation, if we cannot meet face to face. I know that meetings can be inefficient as well, but my experience is that the immediate feedback in both directions makes a meeting much more desirable than trying to deal with the vast majority of student e-mail questions dealing with assignment problems. For example, an e-mailed question along the lines of...
"...I have tried several times to solve chapter 4, problem 3 and it did not work; can you tell me what I did wrong?... " - this is quite a stereotypical question that does not reveal much of an idea of the orientation to the problem or the method attempted. Thus, it is really difficult for me to know where I should begin with an answer that will resonate with what the questioner knows. Further, an e-mailed question along the lines of "how should I get started with assignment #3" does not do a very good job of providing highly specific clues to any obstacle. Another common question I receive is: "....what am I doing wrong in that I cannot get my graphs to look right..." I am not saying that I will not entertain questions along these lines, but I can pretty much assure you that I will not e-mail you the answer you desire. I will however, e-mail you back and suggest that we meet or at least have a telephone conversation.
In other words, I believe that a huge proportion of the time that you and I could spend composing e-mail would be better spent by a more direct real-time exchange of information leading to a deduction of the approach to solving a problem. So, please do not be offended when I suggest that we either meet or speak to get you the boost that you want. I thank you in advance for your understanding in helping to streamline our interactions that will ultimately allow you to learn what you will need to know, Many, many thanks!
this page last modified M Schaeffer