BA 325: Excel Analysis Assignment

Information Literacy Reminders:These assignments are open-ended by design and are meant to simulate the type of instructions you would get in a work environment. The goal is to get you comfortable working with datasets and interpreting information. In addition, these activities build the "critical thinking muscle" by requiring you to consider the information resource more critically than you may have previously done. When you are performing your analysis in any given assignment, remember to place context on all data and link it to the relevant course concepts. Your conclusions in any given assignment should be supported by your observations/analysis and demonstrate your comprehensive understanding of the topic(s).

Note: I created the Analytical Thinking Guide specifically as a support resource for this assignment. It is a good resource in general, but the steps align with this assignment and should give you some good initial direction.

After you download the Excel data file associated with this assignment, please look through the data, and then respond to the following questions that are used to assess your information literacy skills. This assignment asks you to think about what analysis tools like Charts, Filter/Sorts, or PivotTables are useful for business decisions. Erica Wagner, your boss, sends you this Excel file and gives you the following information. She says she wants your analysis when she returns from a conference next week. "Once you organize this dataset. I need you to analyze the 18-19 academic year (summer, fall, winter, spring) enrollment by course and term. I am giving a presentation to the new Provost in an attempt to convince her to invest more money in the undergraduate business program because we are growing both online and on campus. I think the following stats will be convincing: Popularity of our undergraduate classes (numbers 100-499, please exclude 400-410 course numbers) o By concentration and BA core o Fill rate and total enrollment What term/meeting day is the most popular and which is the least? o Fill rate and total enrollment What is the ratio of ground campus classes versus online courses? o By concentration and BA core While you are running these calculations see what else you can interpret from the data that should also be included in my talk. Please get this to me by end of next week. Thanks!"

Your Deliverable: Write up your findings in a Word Document with Executive Summary (no more than 900) that answers your boss' questions. Use screen clippings of the analysis you did in Excel as evidence to support your conclusions (75%). Also submit your Excel workbook that shows your calculations, charts, figures, tables, etc. (25%). At this point, you should be very comfortable with some of the analytical tools within Excel, and this is an opportunity to show that. Be sure to follow the guidelines set in the BA 325 Information Literacy Assessment Rubric (You may use any font size/style/paragraph spacing/line spacing that you are comfortable with).