SAS/SQL Programming Coursework

You are required to :

a) Write a SAS program to input the supplied spreadsheet data containing student attendance and module marks.

Copies of the spreadsheets can be found in blackboard in the Coursework folder of Teaching Material.

You will find there is a spreadsheet listing student details and for each of 4 modules, there are several spreadsheets containing attendance data and one spreadsheet (total 4) containing student marks.

Create one SAS data set for all the attendance data and one SAS data set for all the student marks. Refer to task 2 to see what data is required.

b) The data are required by different people within the organisation.

Create SAS output (i.e. reports) for each of the following individuals. You will need to decide on the information to be included in the report(s) to meet the needs of each type of user.

a. The Year manager.
The year manager has responsibility for individual student welfare and progression. The year tutor needs to be aware of students who are missing classes. This could be consistently missing the same class and/or students missing for more than one week from all classes. Attendance below 70% on a module is considered problematic. The year tutor requires a list of students who are missing classes each week as the registers are created.

b. The course leader.
The course leader has overall responsibility for a course and its delivery and will require summary statistics on individual modules (attendance and student marks), individual students (attendance and marks) as well as being responsible for calculating the overall mark for each student’s average mark.

c. The Department head.
The department head has responsibility for monitoring the student experience and the courses offered. This individual will need to carry out more specific analysis. For example:
a) To identify modules and students which have above and below average attendance/results.
b) To identify associations between achievement and attendance,
c) To identify associations between results and student demographics,
d) To identify associations between attendance and student demographics.

They will also be responsible for setting the policies used by the department, for example:
a) in setting an attendance level below which some type of action is required by the year manager (currently 70%). Would a different attendance level help meet the university objective of 50% of students achieving an overall average of 60% over their module marks.
b) Identifying when modules are too easy or too hard,
c) Identifying when a module has poor attendance.

They will also be involved in making strategic decisions such as:
a) Is attendance monitoring worthwhile?
b) Should students who achieve 39 % in a module be automatically be rounded up to 40%?
c) Should an overall attendance level be set?
Failure to achieve the level of attendance will result in failing a course overall. Example rules could be:
• if students attend below 70% in each module, they fail the attendance requirement
• if students have an average attendance for all modules below 70%, they fail the attendance requirement.
How many students would be removed from the course with each of these policies?

Present your findings in a report, which should state how your SAS reports meet the needs of the specific user types and should include the SAS reports to prove your case.

You should also place all your SAS programs in the appendix.