Students should adhere to these deadlines. The instructor will give help and feedback to students who meet them but offers no such assurances to those who do not. Do not leave computer work until the end of the semester. At the semester's end computers are busy, computer staff are overworked, and the instructor has little time to give advice. In addition to the paper, there will be homework assignments, which are frequent in the first half of the semester and infrequent thereafter.
Most assignments involve use of the computer.
To obtain credit for homework, students must hand it in on time and be prepared to present solutions orally in class. The course will be run as a series of two-hour lectures with discussion. Computation Homework and data analyses for the term paper are may done on the Social Science Computing Cooperative Unix and VMS networks or on personal computers. Most class work will be done using the Stata software package, which comes in both PC and Unix versions. Stata is an excellent tool for estimating models, displaying data, and managing small to medium sized data files.