Lab Policy

There will be a total of eight labs in STAT 385. Labs are (mostly and probably) administered through PrairieLearn.

To access the course’s PrairieLearn content, simply navigate to prairielearn.org and add the course.

Policy

The labs will take various forms depending on the current course topics, but the expectation is that they will all be administered through PrairieLearn. When necessary, specific labs will have extra directions related to submission and grading.

Labs are meant to be guided practice. As such, each lab will have a corresponding video walking through (often completely) each exercise.

Because labs are be a guided experience, and have a lesser effect on overall course grades that quizzes, no buffer points will be recorded, but we will accept late work for 75% credit. As an example, consider Lab 01:

  • 100% Credit: Thursday, September 8, 11:59 PM
  • 75% Credit: Thursday, September 15, 11:59 PM

Unless otherwise specified, assume you cannot load any external R libraries or source any additional files. The following “words” are considered illegal, and cannot be found anywhere in code submitted to the autograder unless specifically allowed in a particular exercise:

  • library
  • require
  • source
  • ::

Labs and their associated videos will be released one week before the 100% credit deadline, at the latest.

Tips and Tricks

  • Labs, like quizzes, have unlimited attempts, and with each submission your score can never go down.
  • Before submitting to the autograder, you should run your code locally and verify that it produces the expected output.
  • If you are asked to write a function, you should test it locally by supplying potential values for each argument.
  • Unless a question notes otherwise, you do not need to defend against improper input to your functions. That is, you can assume we will test your code with input that agrees with the descriptions of the arguments in the question statement.