DISC 203 – Project Grading Rubric

Overall, the project is 20% of the grades. 5 points are for the presentations and they are
graded as per the criteria above. Project slides and supporting materials are worth 15 points.
They typically fall in three buckets:

1) High achievers (10-15 points): Students who perform proper examination of their
datasets, explore possible interactions between variables, check for quadratic effects and
perform rigorous statistical testing using t-tests (for testing individual significance of
variables) and ANOVA F-tests (for testing joint significance of a set of variables). These
topics are covered in sections 12.5 - 12.9 as well as in lecture slides, practice sets, class
activities and project tutorials. The scores also depend on how well you have interpreted your
results. Some projects (optionally) also discuss about regression assumptions and issues such
as multicollinearity; we discussed these in the last lecture (and they are also covered in
sections 12.11 and 12.12).

2) Average (5-10 points): Students who are unable to perform proper statistical
analysis as in (1) but still cover the basics well. They estimate an adequate multiple
regression model, test individual significance of variables (using a t-test) and discuss about
the overall significance of their model (using R-square, Adjusted R-square or an F-test).
These topics are covered in sections 12.1 - 12.4 of the book. These projects do not advance to
sections 12.5 - 12.9, so can earn a max of 10/15 points.

3) Low performers (0-5 points): These projects even manage to get the basics
wrong. Some common mistakes in this category include : defining the variables incorrectly
(for example, treating categorical variables as numeric variables), interpreting the effect sizes
(betas) incorrectly, either not performing statistical tests of hypothesis at all (just limited to
R-Square or Adjusted R-Square values) or interpreting the results from these tests of
hypothesis incorrectly.