Chapter 7 Programming

Basic programming skills are very important to increase your chances of getting the job of your liking. If you can comfortably run simple analyses and write scripts, you have a strong advantage over other candidates.

Just before your internship you will have a course called General Research Skills (GRS). In this course, you will be prepared for your internship by teaching you how to effectively search literature, keep your lab journal, and for the largest part: Statistics.

Many students find statistics to be a difficult subject. After all, within one course you have to brush up your programming skills, basic mathematics and learn the actual statistics.

We have therefore decided to offer students a self-test of their R programming skill. To pass this assignment, all you have to do is do the test and submit it. It does not matter how many questions you answer correctly.

However, to accommodate students that find programming difficult, we offer a one-week crash course in R, the week before GRS (for 2022–2023 students, the crash course starts January 30).

Assignment 7

  • Download the test here;
  • Open the test in Adobe Reader, or another program that supports fillable PDFs;
  • Try answering first without the use of R, or internet;
  • Then, you may use R to see if you can figure out the exercises you weren’t able to answer;
  • Save your changes to the PDF and submit the result to Brightspace.

Finished the test? The answers will be made available after the meeting, so you can check how many questions you answered correctly. The implications are shown in the table below:

Table 7.1: How to interpret the outcome of the self-test.
Correct answers Interpretation
<50% Don’t worry, we will start GRS all the way from the beginning, but consider joining the R Crash Course to reduce your study load during GRS.
50–75% Your R skills need some brushing up, but you will probably be able to keep up with the pace of the course just fine. You are still welcome to join if you want a refresher.
75%> You are more than good enough at R for GRS.

Upload your filled in PDF to Brightspace. Please rename the file to “lastname_studentnumber.pdf”. Deadline: 30 January