Open-book, online, and the final is the shock

Every assessment is open-book

AFM 112 is examined online with the textbook, your notes and a spreadsheet open. That one fact decides how to study. Nobody is marked on adding twelve numbers by hand; a machine does that. What is marked is whether, given a scenario and a small table, you can name the right tool (SUMIFS rather than SUMIF), the right layout (which field goes in a pivot's Rows), the right type (is a postal code numeric?), the right chart, and the right CRISP-DM phase for the task described. The skill is recognition under a little time pressure.

The weights, and what each one rewards

The scheme this course is built on: weekly LEARN quizzes about 60 %, open-book, with the three lowest scores dropped; a midterm about 10 % and a final about 10 %, both open-book and online; the crew dashboard project 12.5 %; and live-lecture participation about 7.5 %. Two things students report every term matter more than the percentages. First, the quizzes are almost identical to the textbook's practice questions — so the practice set is the quiz bank, and dropping three means a bad week is survivable. Second, the midterm and especially the final are much harder than the quizzes, not because they are closed-book (they are not) but because they compose several tools inside one scenario and then ask which phase each step belongs to.

Worked example — a quiz-shaped item and a final-shaped item

Take one concept, conditional sums, and look at it in both registers.

Quiz-shaped. "Maple & Birch's orders sheet has provinces in B2:B13 and amounts in D2:D13. In Google Sheets, which formula totals the Ontario orders?" Four options; one is =SUMIF(B2:B13, "ON", D2:D13), one swaps the argument order, one uses COUNTIF, one uses SUMIFS with the ranges reversed. You pick. Twenty seconds if you know the argument order; the textbook is open if you do not.

Final-shaped. "An analyst at Maple & Birch (1) agrees with the CFO that a $100 gap in average order value would justify a second Alberta store, (2) writes a data dictionary for the exported orders file, (3) adds a column of amount per unit, (4) builds a pivot of average amount by province, and (5) notes that the Alberta average rests on two orders and cannot support the decision. Which step is evaluation?" Five steps, six phases, and the distractors are the neighbouring phases. There is nothing to look up: the book cannot read the scenario for you.

The difference is not difficulty of arithmetic — there is none in either. It is that the final-shaped item asks you to hold a whole process in view and place one step inside it. That is why this course teaches the process in Module 1 and tags every later lesson with its phase.

Sorting three items

Before reading on, sort these: (a) "Which pivot layout shows average amount by province and channel?" (b) "Given the five-step project above, which step produces the prepared dataset deliverable?" (c) "Which R call returns the number of rows in orders?" Items (a) and (c) are quiz-shaped: one tool, one answer, lookup-able. Item (b) is final-shaped: it needs the process and its deliverables, which is Lesson 1.6.

A fast track

If you already own Sheets or Excel — references, COUNTIF, pivots — the course lets you start at Module 9, where R begins. Everyone else should take the modules in order: the R half is where students without a spreadsheet habit stall, and the spreadsheet modules are the habit.