Program Evaluation (Spring 2026 PMAP 8521) News

Week 3 tips and FAQs

All that statistical significance really tells you is how confident you are that a measured effect is not zero. Or, more formally, using our null world idea, if something is…

Week 2.5 tips and FAQs

Making cleaner, nicer Quarto documents

Weeks 1–2 tips and FAQs

Put simply, the tidyverse is a bunch of R packages that work nicely together and make it easier to manipulate and plot data.

Copy, paste, and tweak

Learning programming is a little different from learning other skills or materials. In other classes you’ve taken, you read articles or textbooks, take notes on them, talk…

Why do you use ✓s for grades?

Many of you are really nervous about getting the exact right answers on your problem sets. You’re used to more standard grading practices where you lose points for minor…

LLM FAQs

For your first set of FAQs, some questions that I’ve been getting a lot about AI and LLMs. You already read this thing about what I think about LLMs. This is more detailed.

The 30-minute rule and how to ask for help

When working through the examples or exercises, you will get stuck. It’s inevitable.

First week of class!

Building community

The most common question I get from students before the class is this:

Important R stuff

From reading the syllabus you’ll notice that we’re using R in this class (though you can certainly use Stata too if you really want—I just won’t be able to give you feedback…

Announcements and updates

Over the course of the semester, I’ll be sending you lots of updates and announcements and FAQs.

Welcome to class!

Hello everyone!