Ability to recognize and focus on the immediate task(s) to be resolved.

A generic approach used to analyze a case has the following steps: (1) identify the key issue, constraints and opportunities, (2) analyze case data, (3) generate alternatives, (4) qualitatively assess the alternatives, (5) quantitatively assess the alternatives, and (6) make decision and recommend plan of action. The following criteria that are used to grade your case reports should give you a better idea of what each step involves. These criteria also appear in Report Guidelines under the Cases icon link on the home page.
Identification of Key Issues, Constraints and Opportunities
Ability to recognize and focus on the immediate task(s) to be resolved. Ability to recognize and identify constraints or opportunities imposed or provided by the key resources of an organization. The key resources include money, people materials, equipment, facilities and the management system.
Case Data Analysis
Ability to apply statistical tools, theories, and techniques to the decision making process. Ability to distinguish the appropriateness of various theoretical perspectives to the decision or issue under consideration and how to apply concepts correctly. Ability to recognize the usefulness and limitation of various statistical theories, concepts and tools.
Generating Alternatives
Creative skills in generating a list of potential alternatives.
Qualitative Assessment of Alternatives
Ability to assess alternatives using some of the following qualitative criteria: competitive advantage, customer satisfaction, employee morale, corporate image, ease of implementation, synergy, ethics, flexibility, safety, visual appeal, obsolescence, cultural sensitivity, motivation, and goodwill.
Quantitative Assessment of Alternatives
Ability to assess alternatives using computations performed in Excel/PHStat and interpret the results.
Decision Making and Recommended Plan of Action
Ability to make a logical, coherent and consistent decision to choose the best alternative, and to plan a series of actions which lead to a desired result. Ability to tie the financial, physical, human and technological resources to a chronology with a specific deadline.
Quality of the Writing
Ability to write clearly and concisely without spelling, grammatical and structural errors. Part of the quality score will be inversely related to the amount of statistical jargon used.
Case Report Writing Guidelines
⦁ Generic Structure
⦁ Executive Summary — no more than one page and no statistical jargon
⦁ Brief description of the key issue
⦁ Summary of the main findings and recommendation.
⦁ Body of report — no more than 3 pages
⦁ Identification of the key issues
⦁ Identification of the existence of any constraints or opportunities
⦁ Description of the alternatives
⦁ Assessment of the alternatives
⦁ Decision and Recommendations
⦁ Appendices — number of pages depending on the case as needed
⦁ A good report will have the following characteristics:
⦁ The report will begin with an Executive Summary.
⦁ The body of the report will include your analysis, evaluation of alternatives, decision and recommendation. It should include charts as they are appropriate to your explanation of your results. The report itself should contain the minimum amount of statistical jargon. The rule that we use is that “your boss who is smart but no expert in statistics should be able to understand.” You must show that you can translate statistical findings into everyday language.
⦁ A good report always use section headings and may include sub-headings if needed.
⦁ Your statistical analysis should be presented in an appendix to the report. It should be clear to the reader how you arrived at the conclusions in the body of your report. An annotation of EXCEL results that are pasted into the appendix is often a good way to make the appendix.
⦁ Report Requirements
⦁ All reports must be typed in Microsoft Word using Time New Roman, 12 point font in double space. No separate attached spreadsheet files will be allowed. All EXCEL results should be pasted into the Word document.
⦁ The first page of each team report must have the names and LOUIE account ID of each member of the team. Only the name and LOUIE account ID of the student submitting the report are needed for an individual report.
⦁ The second page of each report must be the Executive Summary. Results in the Executive Summary must be explained in non-technical language. The page must be labeled, “Executive Summary.”
⦁ The body of the report must begin with a fresh page and should include tables and charts as appropriate.
⦁ Each report must contain an appendix that provides the statistical results or tables that are the foundation of your explanation if appropriate.
⦁ Submissions
0. The reports should be consolidated into just one single Word file. Save the Word file using the following naming convention: “Eco321*#Case&.doc” where * should either be “Individual” or “Team” depending on if it is an individual or team report, # should be your team number (1, 2, 3, etc.) or individual member number and & should be the case number. They should be submitted on Bb Learn as an attachment by the deadline indicated under the Schedule icon by following the procedures listed below.
1. Logon to Bb Learn. Click at the “Cases” link. Click at the “Case * Report (Final)” where * is the case number. Click at the Choose File button to browse to the folder that contains the draft that you want to submit. Click at the Submit button to submit your draft. There is also a link “Case * Report (Draft)” for each case that you can submit NOT your final report but your draft if you want to check the SA report that SafeAssign generates for the % of matches in your draft before submitting your final report.
2. There will be a 30% penalty for every 24 hours past the due date with no exceptions.
⦁ Graded team reports will be deposited back to your team’s discussion area while graded individual reports will be e-mailed back to your individual mailbox on Bb Learn.
⦁ Each person on the team should evaluate the other team members’ performance on a scale of 4-0. You will receive a hardcopy of the “Self and Peer Evaluation” form in class in due time. One is also available for your perusal ⦁ here. Your individual effort score will be the average of the evaluation scores on you by your team members. If the evaluation is not submitted by a team member, that team member will receive a “0” from the other team members automatically.
⦁ Examples of statistical jargon that should be avoided in the Executive Summary but are quite acceptable in the body of the report and appendices:
⦁ Confidence interval
⦁ Alpha level, significance level
⦁ T-statistic
⦁ F-statistic
⦁ Null and alternative hypothesis
⦁ R-square
⦁ Writing out a regression specification
⦁ Assumptions
⦁ Using variable names from your data set
⦁ p-value, standard deviation, variance, type I error, type II error, etc.
⦁ Common mistakes
⦁ Treating your readers like your professors – Students often write reports assuming that the person reading the report has a good knowledge of statistics and the background of the case. This will typically be wrong. There needs to be some introduction and description of the key issue(s) to bring the reader up to speed.
⦁ Failing to describe the sample. Failing to include summary statistics on a description of the sample in the appendix.
⦁ Poor use of graphs or charts – Visuals can be an important addition to a good report. However, they must make understanding the report easier. Poor quality visuals or visuals that simply are included with no real thought distract from the report.
⦁ Inclusion of tables in the appendix with no explanation.
⦁ Cutting and pasting the same sentence over and over. No one is interested in reading the identical language again and again. Students often use this as a short cut in the appendix when they are explaining their procedure.
⦁ Explaining how to generate numbers in Excel. We do not care how to do things in Excel.
⦁ Explaining formulae used to calculate numbers. We do not care about the formulae for standard deviation, t-statistic, in the report.
⦁ Not separating the executive summary and the body of the paper. There should be a clear break between the two.
⦁ Using the executive summary as the introductory paragraph of the report. The executive summary should stand alone. It should contain all the essential information from the report. Reading this executive summary should give you the essential information of the report.
⦁ Sloppy presentation
i. Writing something in with pencil or pen.
ii. Using several different type fonts when it is not necessary. It is fine to use a fixed font for tables and a proportional font for the text. However, all the tables should use the same font. All the text should use the same font, except when you are using a new font for effect.
iii. Poor quality paper.
iv. Spelling errors.
v. Grammar errors.
vi. Informal style – The report should use business language.
⦁ Saying something is “significant” without explanation.
Examples
i. “Gender is significant in explaining differences in sales.” – This is the result of a difference of means test. It is not enough for management to know that there is a difference. “Average sales for men were significantly below those for women,” conveys much more information.
ii. “Work experience was significantly related to job satisfaction.” – What is the relationship? “Our lowest levels of job satisfaction are among our newest and most long term employees,” might be a good summary of an estimated curvilinear relationship that looks like an upside down “U”.
⦁ Being a “slave” to a .05 significance level. This level may be appropriate for decisions in social science research, but a different level may be appropriate for different kinds of business decisions. This is the level of Type I error. You must make a judgment about the costs of type I and type II error when deciding how to evaluate your results. For example, you might find that the difference in passing proportions on an exam has a p-value of .09. That is not normally sufficient for you to reject the null hypothesis. However, if you fail to act on a possible discriminatory test, the consequences might be severe for the company. In this case, the cost of type II error (failure to reject a false null) is large. You should use a relatively large p-value so that you are reasonably confident that there is no prima facia case for a discriminatory test.
⦁ Failure to read the case requirements – If something is specially required for the case, then you definitely lose points if you leave it out. When there are specific questions asked, be sure to make your answers to these questions clear.
⦁ Using questions from the case as section titles.
⦁ Speculating about possible causes for some results when this speculation could have been tested with data from the sample.
⦁ Inclusion of missing data as real data.
⦁ Making scales (Guttman scales) from variables that are coded in opposite directions.
⦁ In Excel, making pivot tables that do not give the correct summary statistic. For example, the table contains sums when you really wanted counts.
⦁ Failure to use one-tailed tests and one-tailed alternative hypotheses when it is clear that the direction could be predicted before the test. Failure to adjust p-values accordingly since p-values given by the software are often two-tailed.
⦁ Using the sample data to predict the direction of a test. The alternative hypotheses should be specified prior to examining results from a sample.
⦁ Interpreting discrete variables as if they were continuous.
⦁ Interpreting continuous variables as if they were discrete variables.
⦁ Providing means of categorical variables. Unless the categorical variable is coded as 0-1, the mean is meaningless. If a categorical variable is codes as 0-1, then the mean is the proportion of the sample with 1’s. Interpret it that way. Provide a table of frequencies for categorical variables.
⦁ Characteristics that make some reports stand out as high quality
⦁ Explain the concepts asked about in the case in everyday language.
⦁ Address all questions asked about in the case.
⦁ Attempts to understand the results – Suppose that you find that your male employees have lower average sales than your female employees. Why might this be true? Is there some change in training that the company can make that will close this gap? Is there any other evidence in the data set that might help you pin down why this difference occurs? Is there some way of gathering evidence that might help the company understand why this occurs?
⦁ A concise and informative executive summary.
⦁ References in the body of the report to tables that are included in the appendix.
⦁ Clear labeling of all figures and tables.
⦁ Good use of visual presentations to illustrate the points that are made.
⦁ Numbering pages.
⦁ Indication that the group really put thought into the context of the report in the real world. It is sometimes fun, and often valuable, to consider how this problem might come up in the real world. The data that we use are generic with little background information available. If you had more information, would it be helpful? If information that might be useful is not contained in the project write up or in the data set, why not make up some plausible situation? For example, if the report concerns sales by associates, you might want to think about the business context where this would be an especially important report.

⦁ Grading Criteria
The case report points will be divided into two groups. Eighty percent will be allocated to the quality of the report. Twenty percent will be allocated to the self/peer evaluation.
If a student receives from all other team members the lowest score of 0 in each category listed in the Self-Peer Evaluation Form, I take this as the strongest signal that this student has not been contributing sufficiently to the case to deserve any points and, hence, he/she will receive a zero on self-peer evaluation and a zero on that case report automatically.
Below is a hypothetical distribution that will be used in grading the case reports with brief descriptions of each of the grading criteria used.
Executive Summary
This capsule should be able to stand alone. If you could write only one page about your report, what would you put on it?
Identification of Key Issues, Constraints and Opportunities
Ability to recognize and focus on the immediate task(s) to be resolved. Ability to recognize and identify constraints or opportunities imposed or provided by the key resources of an organization. The key resources include money, people materials, equipment, facilities and the management system.
Case Data Analysis
Ability to apply statistical tools, theories, and techniques to the decision making process. Ability to distinguish the appropriateness of various theoretical perspectives to the decision or issue under consideration and how to apply concepts correctly. Ability to recognize the usefulness and limitation of various statistical theories, concepts and tools.
Generating Alternatives
Creative skills in generating a list of potential alternatives.
Qualitative Assessment of Alternatives
Ability to assess alternatives using some of the following qualitative criteria: competitive advantage, customer satisfaction, employee morale, corporate image, ease of implementation, synergy, ethics, flexibility, safety, visual appeal, obsolescence, cultural sensitivity, motivation, and goodwill.
Quantitative Assessment of Alternatives
Ability to assess alternatives using computations performed in Excel/PHStat and interpret the results.
Decision Making and Recommended Plan of Action
Ability to make a logical, coherent and consistent decision to choose the best alternative, and to plan a series of actions which lead to a desired result. Ability to tie the financial, physical, human and technological resources to a chronology with a specific deadline.
Quality of the Writing
Ability to write clearly and concisely without spelling, grammatical and structural errors. Part of the quality score will be inversely proportional to the amount of statistical jargon used. The following writing assessment rubric adopted by the college will be used to assess the quality of the writing.

Grading rubrics:
Categories Level of Achievement Scores Comments
Executive Summary (x2)
Background Information, Identification of Key Issues, Constraints and Opportunities (x2)
Case Data Analysis (x3)
Generating Alternatives (x2)
Qualitative Assessment (x1)
Quantitative Assessment (x3)
Decision Making and Recommended Plan of Action (x3)
Quality of the Writing (x4)
Total