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Students & Educators
Nadja Young 0
Busting myths of education value-added analysis, Part 2: It is harder to show growth with high-achieving students

Welcome to Part 2 of the value-added Myth Busters blog series…have you heard this one before? Educators serving high-achieving students are often concerned that their students’ entering achievement level makes it more difficult for them to show growth. “How can my students show growth if they are already earning high

Learn SAS
Julie Platt 0
Working on “stuff that matters”

“It’s not about how much money you make but to work on stuff that matters," according to Tim O’Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media. At the recent Tools of Change conference, Tim O’Reilly mentioned during his keynote that writers tend to be motivated to work on “stuff that matters.” Through SAS

Rick Wicklin 0
How to plot a discontinuous function

It is easy to use the SGPLOT procedure in SAS to plot the graph of a well-behaved continuous function: just create a data set of the (x,y) values on some domain and use the SERIES statement to connect the points. However, to plot the graph of a discontinuous function correctly

Data Visualization
Sanjay Matange 0
Custom Box Plots

A frequent question we get from users is how to create a box plot with custom whiskers lengths.  Some want to plot the 10th and 90th percentile, while other want the 5th and 95th percentiles.  The VBOX statement in the SGPLOT  procedure does not provide for custom whiskers.  Also, unlike GTL,

Chris Hemedinger 0
Applied data science in college basketball

Revenge of the Nerds was so 1980s. Now it's a new world order: math geeks and athletes are working together. I'm not talking just about what happens when data nerds observe, analyze, and predict sports outcomes -- as they do in March Madness with their "bracketology". That's compelling, but your

Data Visualization
Sanjay Matange 0
Box with Scatter Overlay

A common request we have been often hearing is for display of the distribution of data as a box plot, along with some detailed information overlaid.  For example, one may have ratings data of all the hospitals in a region by different specialty, and you want to view this distribution

Students & Educators
Nadja Young 0
Busting myths of education value-added analysis, Part 1: You must control for demographics

In the past five years, value-added models have been increasingly adopted by states to support various teaching effectiveness policies. As educators make the paradigm shift from looking at only achievement data to incorporating growth data, many misconceptions have developed. Compounding this issue is the fact that not all value-added and