Chapter 12 Frequently Asked Questions about the Midterm Assessment
You will find here answers about some of the questions received about the Midterm Assessment. Please check QMPlus for the document with the main information.
12.1 Questions
12.1.1 Can we get an extension?
No, unless you are thinking about applying for an extension on the basis of Extenuating Circumstances (EC), where the usual rules apply.
All the content required to perform in the assessment has been delivered in time, we have doubled up office hours and recorded a video to compensate for any missing seminars due to industrial action. Moreover, the assessment details were released almost 3 weeks before the deadline and we spent a good section of the lecture in week 5 discussing questions about it.
Finally, an extension requires agreement from the School’s Chair of Exams, and would also have knock-on effects on other assessment deadlines later.
12.1.2 Why can’t we ask questions about the assessment?
There is a purely pedagogical reason for this. Much of what you need to master in this module requires that you look for information on other cases and find ways to apply it to your problem. That way, if I ask you to think about seminar activities that look like the things you are being asked in the assessment, you will eventually learn this very useful skill.
So please, stop asking questions about the assessment, particularly those about how to do thinkgs in R. everything you need to know is in this website.
12.1.3 Can we get examples of blog posts that we can use to write ours?
Of course. If you check the last section of the assessment instructions you will find links to different blog posts. The list is copied here:
- Profs. Tim Bale and Paul D. Webb on the Labour leadership race
- Prof. Chris Hanretty on how voters punish (or not) their MPs for the stances they take
- Profs. Carolina Plescia, André Blais and John Högström on How voters dislike disproportionality
- Dr. Zac Greene and Dr. Javier Sajuria on Who gets to speak at Labour’s Party Conference
- Dr. Nicole Martin and Dr. Scott Blinder on Whether voters are rejudiced or not against ethnic minority candidates
- Victoria Donnaloja on National identification and political engagement after naturalisation
- Neema Begum on How inmmigration policy drives Brexit voters
12.1.4 How do I load the data file into Rstudio.cloud?
This is a regular question and I sent a message on February 20 with instructions. Ther is a useful video here:
If youw ant to know how to load .RData files into R, you can check Seminar 2.
However, if nothing of this works, you can use this code:
brexit <- readRDS(url('https://github.com/QMUL-SPIR/Public_files/blob/master/datasets/BrexitResults.rds?raw=true'))12.1.5 I don’t understand how to recode the variables
The main task requires you to compare groups on their brexit vote (i.e. using t-tests and plots), but some of the variables are not nominal, but continuous. This means that you will have to recode them to create two groups out of them. Here is an example using data we have used in semnars, so you can adapt it to your needs:
library(tidyverse)
world.data <- read.csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/QMUL-SPIR/Public_files/master/datasets/QoG2012.csv")
median_wealth <- median(world.data$wdi_gdpc, na.rm = T)
world.data <- world.data %>% mutate(wealth_binary = case_when(wdi_gdpc > median_wealth ~ 1, wdi_gdpc <= median_wealth ~ 0))12.1.6 I am not sure how to run or interpret t-tests
Fear no more, there is an entire section of this website (on top of seminar slides, recordings and readings) devoted to it: section 6.1.3.