Attendance and participation

We strongly encourage all students to participate actively in all learning activities. Regular engagement is crucial for your success in this unit, as these activities provide opportunities to deepen your understanding of the material, collaborate with peers, and receive valuable feedback from instructors, to assist in completing the unit assessments. Your active participation not only enhances your own learning experience but also contributes to a vibrant and dynamic learning environment for everyone.

Requirements to Pass this Unit

To pass this unit you must:

• Achieve a total mark equal to or greater than 50%.

Hurdle Assessments

There is no Hurdle Assessment in this unit.

Late Assessment Submission Penalty

Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, a 5% penalty (of the total possible mark) will be applied each day a written assessment is not submitted, up until the 7th day (including weekends). After the 7th day, a grade of 0 will be awarded even if the assessment is submitted. Submission time for all written assessments is set at 11:55 pm. A 1-hour grace period is provided to students who experience a technical concern.

For any late submission of time-sensitive tasks, such as scheduled tests/exams, performance assessments/presentations, and/or scheduled practical assessments/labs, students need to submit an application for Special Consideration.

Assessments where Late Submissions will be accepted.

• Problem Set 1 – YES, Standard Late Penalty applies;
• Problem Set 2 – YES, Standard Late Penalty applies;
• Individual Project – YES, Standard Late Penalty applies.

Special Consideration

The Special Consideration Policy aims to support students who have been impacted by short-term circumstances or events that are serious, unavoidable and significantly disruptive, and which may affect their performance in assessment. If you experience circumstances or events that affect your ability to complete the assessments in this unit on time, please inform the convenor and submit a Special Consideration request through https://connect.mq.edu.au.

Written Assessments/Quizzes/Tests: If you experience circumstances or events that affect your ability to complete the written assessments in this unit on time, please inform the convenor and submit a Special Consideration request through https://connect.mq.edu.au.

Classes

Workshops (beginning in Week 1): There is one 1-hour workshop each week. During this hour, we will provide a brief overview of the week's content, run a Q&A session, and engage in some interesting activites together. 

Pre-recorded Lectures (released weekly from Week 1): There are no formal live lectures scheduled for this unit. Each week we will have some video recordings covering the unit materials.

SGTA classes (beginning in Week 2): Students must register in and attend one 2-hour class per week.

The timetable for classes can be found on the University website at: https://publish.mq.edu.au

Enrolment can be managed using eStudent at: https://students.mq.edu.au/support/technology/systems/estudent

Suggested textbooks

The following textbooks are useful as supplementary resources, for additional questions and explanations. They are available from the Macquarie University library:

• Garrett Grolemund, Hadley Wickham & Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel (2023) R for Data Science, 2nd Edition. O’Reilly Media, Inc.https://r4ds.hadley.nz
• Grolemund, G. (2014) Hands-on programming with R. 1st edition. Sebastopol, CA, O’Reilly Media. https://rstudio-education.github.io/hopr/
• Wickham, H., Navarro, D. & Pedersen T.L. (2025) ggplot2 Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis . 3nd ed (work in progress). Springer. https://ggplot2-book.org 
• Wickham, H. & Bryan, J. (2023) R packages. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA, O’Reilly. https://r-pkgs.org. 

Technology Used and Required

This subject requires the use of the following computer software:

• R: R is a free statistical software package. Access and installation instructions may be found at: https://www.r-project.org/
• RStudio: RStudio is an open-source tool that is used to manage and present work performed using R. Access and installation instructions may be found at https://rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/
• LaTeX: LaTeX is a free mathematical typesetting program. Access and installation instructions may be found at: https://www.latex-project.org/get/
• Git: Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
• Quarto: An open-source scientific and technical publishing system, insatlled by default with the latest release of RStudio. 

Students are invited to bring their own devices (BYOD) and a laptop is recommended. Acceptable platforms are Windows, Linux and Mac. 

Communication

We will communicate with you via your university email or through announcements on iLearn. Queries to convenors can either be placed on the iLearn discussion forum or sent to your lecturers from your university email address.

COVID Information

For the latest information on the University’s response to COVID-19, please refer to the Coronavirus infection page on the Macquarie website: https://www.mq.edu.au/about/coronavirus-faqs. Remember to check this page regularly in case the information and requirements change during semester. If there are any changes to this unit in relation to COVID, these will be communicated via iLearn.

This is the first delivery of this unit, so the following scheudle is subject to change. 

STAT1379 superceded our previous offering of STAT1378. The main changes are:

• The unit schedule has been redesigned to allow more time to cover the basics and to reduce the time spent on various typsettting systems. This has created space to include some new topics such as databases, web scrapping and storytelling with data. 
• Quarto is now the primary typesetting system we used in this unit. Together with version control using Git & Github, these tools are integrated into our weekly activities, rather than being used just once or twice for assessemnt purposes. 
• An extra hours of workshop has been added so we can do some engaging activities together as a community. 

We highly appreciate student feedback as it helps us enhance our unit offerings continually. Therefore, we encourage students to provide constructive feedback through various channels, such as student surveys, direct communication with teaching staff, or by utilising the FSE Student Experience & Feedback link available on the iLearn page.