THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES TERM 1 2022 COMM5011: DATA ANALYSIS FOR BUSINESS FINAL EXAMINATION 1. Time Allowed: 24 Hours. 2. This is a Take-Home Exam, your responses must be your own original work. You must attempt this Take-Home Exam by yourself without any help from others. Thus, you have NOT worked, collaborated or colluded with any other persons in the formulation of your responses. The work that you are submitting for your Take-Home Exam is your OWN work. 3. Release date/time (via Moodle): Friday, 29 April 2022, 9:00am (Australian Eastern Time Zone) 4. Submission date/time (Via Turnitin): Saturday, 30 April 2022, 9:00am (Australian Eastern Time Zone) 5. Failure to upload the exam by the submission time will result in a penalty of 15% of the available marks per hour of lateness. 6. This Examination Paper has 8 pages, including the cover page. 7. This Examination Paper has 2 sections: Section A = Qualitative and Section B = Quantitative. 8. Total number of Questions: 2 in Section A, 3 in Section B. 9. Answer all 5 Questions. 10. Total marks available: 100 marks. This examination is worth 50% of the total marks for the course. 11. Questions are not of equal value. Marks available for question sub-parts are shown on this examination paper. 12. Some questions have word limits as indicated on the question. These word limits must be adhered to. Text in excess of the specified word limit(s) may not be considered in the marking process. PAGE 2 OF 8 1. Candidates must submit a signed Declaration Form together with the Take- Home Exam answer document. Failure to submit the signed Declaration Form may result in your Take-Home Exam answer sheet not being marked. 2. Answers to questions are to be written in the template provided. Please ensure that you provide the following details on your Take-Home Exam answer sheet: Student ID: 3. In accordance with the Declaration Form, this Take-Home Exam paper cannot be copied, forwarded or shared. 4. Students are reminded of UNSW’s rules regarding Academic Integrity and Plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious breach of ethics at UNSW and is not taken lightly. For details see Examples of plagiarism. 5. This Take-Home Exam is an open book/open web, further information is available “Here“. You are permitted to refer to your course notes, any materials provided by the course convenor or lecturer, books, journal articles, or tutorial materials. It is sufficient to use in-text citations that include the following information: the name of the author or authors; the year of publication; the page number (where the information/idea can be located on a particular page when directly quoted), For example, (McConville, 2011, p.188). You are required to cite your sources and attribute direct quotes appropriately when using external sources (other than your course materials). When citing Internet sources, please use the following format: website/page title and date. If you provide in-text citations, you MUST provide a Reference List. The Reference list will NOT BE counted towards your word limit. 6. Students are advised to read the Take-Home Exam paper thoroughly before commencing. 7. The Lecturer-in-Charge (LiC) / Exam Referee will be available online (via Moodle) after the Take-Home Exam paper is released for a period of two hours. z5347180 IMPORTANT Answer all questions from Section A (Qualitative) and all questions from Section B (Quantitative) using separate templates. You must answer Q1 to Q2 using the Template provided for SECTION A and Q3 to Q5 using the Template provided for SECTION B. DO NOT MIX questions from Section A with those from Section B in the same Template. The templates have to be uploaded on separate Turnitin links. SECTION A: QUALITATIVE QUESTIONS (50 MARKS) QUESTION 1 20 MARKS “A focus group is a small group discussion guided by a trained leader or a facilitator, used to learn more about opinions on a specific topic, with the objective of guiding future action.” You are asked to conduct focus groups at GoGet, a car-sharing service company in Australia. The main theme of the focus group is to see if electric vehicles (EV) should be introduced as part of the car fleet to the major cities in Australia. REQUIRED: With reference to the above scenario, answer the following questions: (a) Discuss the process you would conduct focus groups at GoGet. (15 marks) [Answer Word limit – 600 words] (b) Can you suggest and justify another qualitative research method, which would achieve a similar but not exact the same output as the focus group (5 marks) [Answer Word limit – 200 words] PAGE 4 OF 8 z5347180 QUESTION 2 30 MARKS Scammers target university students with fake jobs Beware random offers of work. By David Braue on 31 Mar 2022, 11:12 AM Article extracted from Information Age, published by the Australian Computer Society Case Study: Scammers are stealing millions from university students by exploiting their anxiety about careers and money, a security firm has warned after observing a surge in fake job offers, promises of easy money for working from home, and even recruitment of criminal mules. Nearly 95 per cent of employment fraud attacks are targeted at educational institutions, cyber firm Proofpoint warned in a recent analysis highlighting the many ways malicious scammers are figuring out how to capitalise upon the disruption of remote learning and working. Such scams typically see the instigator posing as a recruiter or employer, promising students healthy salaries for jobs such as caregivers, mystery shoppers, administrative assistants, models, or rebate processors. Unlike advance fee fraud (AFF) – which focuses on short-term gain by demanding upfront processing or other fees – employment fraud is typically a long game, with employers collecting passport details and other personal details from students. Others may request financial details and promise payment if students are willing to receive a payment and transfer it to another account – potentially making them accomplices to money laundering. Proofpoint identifies nearly 4,000 such email threats per day, with European and Australian entities regularly targeted alongside the flood of attacks on American students. Years of working and studying from home have primed university students to be victimised in this way, because carefully-crafted offers may seem both legitimate and easy to access like any other online aspect of university studies. “Students are likely more open to flexible, remote work opportunities [and] international students may not recognise tell-tale signs of fraudulent emails as well as native speakers,” the analysis notes. Particularly this year, it adds, “rising inflation and cost of education [are] putting the pinch on students’ finances, making the promise of quick cash more attractive.” Millennials get taken for more, more often A reported 3,453 job and employment scams cost Australian victims nearly $2.7m last year alone, according to the ACCC’s ScamWatch service, with an additional $378,000 lost in the first two months of this year alone. Millennials have long been identified as being particularly at-risk when it comes to susceptibility to fraud: last year, for example, 18 to 24-year-olds lost $690,963 to 377 reported job and employment scams – an average of $1,833 per episode. That made them bigger financial victims than any other cohort apart from the 65-plus demographic, which lost less money overall but reported fewer scams. NSW residents were the most frequent victims, losing over $1m last year despite reporting a similar number of incidents as WA residents – who lost just over $72,000. Large concentrations of students and staff make universities high-density targets for scammers and phishing attacks, which not only facilitate scams but have led to major issues for the likes of RMIT University and ANU. PAGE 5 OF 8 z5347180 Some universities work proactively to warn students about employment scams, with one institution pointing out signs including generic introductions (“Dear student”), offers arriving unsolicited, spelling and grammar errors, and “unbelievably good pay for very easy work – something that just isn’t that common in the real job market.” Institutions like University of Adelaide, University of Newcastle, and Flinders University have implemented email filters capable of blocking many phishing emails, although one recent analysis found just 10 per cent of Australian universities are using the technology. And while email security companies are using AI (Artificial Intelligence) to analyse messages for the signs of business email compromise (BEC), such techniques may not be as effective in picking up on well-crafted scams and opportunistic campaigns such as a surge in Ukraine- related scams since the Russian invasion. The problem is only likely to get worse, given that losses to scams nearly doubled from 2020, when Australians lost $175.7m to scams, to 2021, when losses increased to $323.7m. “With scammers and cybercriminals continuously reinventing their tactics and finding new ways to exploit Australians for financial gain,” said Proofpoint senior director Adrian Covich, “there is every chance we will see these statistics continue to rise this year.” The entry of above has been extracted from Information Age (published by Australian Computer Society). Source: Scammers target university students with fake jobs | Information Age | ACS Access: 08 April, 2022. REQUIRED: With reference to the above scenario, answer the following three questions: (a) If you were a researcher who are interested in studying certain aspects of employment fraud, propose a research question (RQ) that is appropriate for a qualitative inquiry into educational institutions in Australia. From the scenario, explain your motivation for proposing such a RQ. (5 marks) [Answer Word limit – 200 words] (b) Using the context of the scenario, explain to which category of research design (Exploratory, Descriptive, Explanatory, or Emancipatory) does your RQ belong (5 marks) [Answer Word limit – 200 words] (c) You will select one qualitative research method and one data-gathering technique to answer your RQ. Explain and justify why they are the most appropriate method and technique to address your RQ in this scenario. (20 marks) [Answer Word limit – 800 words] PAGE 6 OF 8 z5347180 IMPORTANT Answer all questions from Section A (Qualitative) and all questions from Section B (Quantitative) using separate templates. You must answer Q1 to Q2 using the Template provided for SECTION A and Q3 to Q5 using the Template provided for SECTION B. DO NOT MIX questions from Section A with those from Section B in the same Template. The templates have to be uploaded on separate Turnitin links. SECTION B: QUANTITATIVE QUESTIONS (50 MARKS) QUESTION 3 25 MARKS Given below are the rating and performance scores of 15 laptop computers. Performance Score 115 191 153 194 236 184 184 216 185 183 189 202 192 141 Overall Rating 74 78 79 80 84 76 77 92 83 78 77 78 78 73 1. What is the sample correlation coefficient between the performance scores and the rating (4 marks) 2. How will you classify the linear relationship between the performance scores and the rating (4 marks) 3. For a laptop computer that has a high rating, you will expect its performance score to [Blank]. (4 marks) 4. You will expect a decrease in the performance score of one laptop computer to be associated with [Blank]. (4 marks) 5. Following this statistical analysis, can you conclude that a decrease in the performance score of one laptop causes a decrease in its rating Why (9 marks) [Answer Word limit – 800 words] PAGE 7 OF 8 z5347180 QUESTION 4 10 MARKS The managing partner of an advertising agency believes that his company’s sales are related to the industry sales. He uses Microsoft Excel’s Data Analysis tool to analyse the last four years of quarterly data (i.e., n = 16) with the following results: Regression statistics Multiple R 0.802 R Square 0.643 Adjusted R Square 0.618 Standard Error SYX 0.9224 Observations 16 ANOVA df SS MS F Sig.F Regression 1 21.497 21.497 25.27 0.000 Error 14 11.912 0.851 Total 15 33.409 Predictor Coef StdError t Stat p-value Intercept 3.962 1.440 2.75 0.016 Industry 0.040451 0.008048 5.03 0.000 Durbin-Watson Statistic 1.59 1. The estimates of the Y-intercept and slope are [Blank] and [Blank], respectively. (5 marks) 2. The prediction for a quarter in which X = 120 is Y = [Blank]. (5 marks) PAGE 8 OF 8 z5347180 QUESTION 5 15 MARKS A chocolate bar manufacturer is interested in trying to estimate how sales are influenced by the price of their product. To do this, the company randomly chooses six country towns and cities and offers the chocolate bar at different prices. Using chocolate bar sales as the dependent variable, the company will conduct a simple linear regression on the data below: City Price ($) Sales Toowoomba 1.30 100 Broken Hill 1.60 90 Bendigo 1.80 90 Kalgoorlie 2.00 40 Launceston 2.40 38 Port Augusta 2.90 32 1. What is the estimated slope parameter for the chocolate bar price and sales data (5 marks) A. -48.193 B. -3.810 C. 161.386 D. 0.784 2. What is the estimated average change in the sales of the chocolate bar if price goes up by $1.00 (5 marks) A. 0.784 B. -3.810 C. 161.386 D. -48.193 3. What is the coefficient of correlation for these data (5 marks) A. 0.8854 B. 0.7839 C. -0.7839 D. -0.8854 — END OF EXAMINATION PAPER —
