Information Pertaining to the 2nd Midterm Exam
Basics
The exam is an open books and open notes exam.
You can use whatever printed or written material that you bring with you
to the exam. You cannot share books or notes during the exam.
You can use a calculator and/or computer during the exam if you wish to.
(Some may wish to use software such as Maple or Mathematica.)
You can connect to the internet to use Wolfram Alpha, a digital copy of the text, or the course web site, but using it for any other
purpose will need prior approval from me. You cannot use the internet to communicate in any way with
another party. Also, cell phones should be kept out of your hands while you're taking the exam.
I'll lecture for about 90 minutes, and give you about 60 minutes for the exam.
Description of the Exam
The exam has 7 problems, having a total of 11 parts. All of the parts will be weighted equally, but I'll only count your best 10 scores from the 11 parts.
Click
here
to see the instructions for your exam.
What to Study
While some basic concepts from the first three chapters (that were covered on the first midterm exam) may be useful,
this exam will focus on Ch. 4 and Ch. 5 of the text, and the majority of the points will be for
Ch. 5 type problems. Also, it'll cover just the main result from Sec. 9.1 of the text that I inserted into my coverage of Ch. 5. (So know how to transform a
uniform (0, 1) r.v. to create a r.v. having a specified continuous dist'n.)
Chapter 4
- Be familiar with the following families of distributions: Bernoulli, binomial, geometric, hypergeometric.
Know (or be able to locate quickly) the formulas for their means, variances, and pmfs. (Keep in mind that it's an open book exam, and so you can look these things up.)
Also know the types of situations for which each distribution is commonly used. (E.g., a binomial r.v. is the number of successes in a fixed number of iid Bernoulli trials.)
Chapter 5
- obtaining probabilities using a pdf, Example on p. 5-4 of the class notes
- expected value of a cont. r. v., p. 180;
Example 2a, p. 180
- variance of a cont. r. v., p. 183;
Example 2e, p. 183
- uniform distributions, pp. 184-185 (noting formulas for mean and variance given in
Example 3a, p. 185);
Example 3b, p. 185
- standard normal dist'n cdf and using it to obtain probabilities, pp. 189-191;
Example 4b, p. 191
- exponential distributions, pp. 197-198 (noting formulas for mean and variance given in
Example 5a, p. 198);
Example 5b, pp. 198-199
- using "cdf method" to find pdf of a function of a r.v.,
Example 7a, p. 208
- Problem 5.40, p. 214 (note that answer given in back of book isn't completely correct since the pdf isn't
1/y for all values of y ... it should be indicated that the support of the dist'n is (1, e))
- Problem 5.3, p. 217 (note that answers for the self-test problems of Ross are given in the back of the book)
22 good problems/parts to review
(with the 20 that are perhaps most important in bold font)
- part (b) of Problem 3, HW 4
- Problem 1, HW 5
- Problem 3, HW 5
- Problem 6, HW 5
- part (a) of Problem 7, HW 5
- part (b) of Problem 7, HW 5
- part (a) of Problem 2, HW 6
- part (b) of Problem 2, HW 6
- Problem 1, HW 7
- Problem 4, HW 7
- Problem 5, HW 7
- Problem 2, HW 8
- Problem 3, HW 8
- part (b) of Problem 1 from old STAT 346 midterm
- Problem 3 from old STAT 346 midterm
- part (a) of Problem 4 from old STAT 346 midterm
- part (b) of Problem 4 from old STAT 346 midterm
- part (a) of Problem 5 from old STAT 346 midterm
- part (d) of Problem 5 from old STAT 346 midterm
- part (e) of Problem 5 from old STAT 346 midterm
- part (f) of Problem 5 from old STAT 346 midterm
- part (a) of Problem 6 from old STAT 346 midterm
In class, I'll distribute copies of a midterm exam
I gave one of my previous STAT 346 classes. (Solutions will also be included.) Your exam will be similar in difficulty, but you'll only have about an
hour to work on the exam.
Click
here
to see this old midterm exam.