It counts 10% of your final grade. Also, it will be graded more critically than homeworks or weekly lab assignments, more like the exams. Creativity and hard work will be rewarded.
The final project is your choice. The professor and labbies will be glad to discuss ideas with you and make suggestions.
Please hand in your final project to your labbie, who will grade it. The writeup should be at least 3 pages and in any event no more than 10 pages. You may work in teams of 2 or 3 people, but you will all get the same grade. If you do work in a team and the team members have more than one labbie, please indicate all labbies involved so that the grades get appropriately recorded. You may hand it in to any of the labbies involved, although there is no guarantee which labbie will grade it.
The "ideal" final project will consist of you generating a data set using either a good statistical experimental design (e.g., random assignment to treatment and control) or a probability sampling technique, and then applying a statistical analysis which uses techniques beyond those in class.
Other ideas include a critical analysis of an article that uses a lot of statistics, a review of a statistical software package, or a Monte Carlo study of some statistical procedure.
Send problems or suggestions to dcox@stat.rice.edu