Study Strategy for the Base SAS Certification Exam

• Take the through the end-of-chapter quizzes in the SAS® Certification Prep Guide: Base Programming for SAS® 9, Third Edition
• When to you get a problem wrong, use the explanation or (when necessary) the material in the chapter to create an Anki flashcard.
• Often, creating a cloze deletion flashcards works well.  For example, the explanation, "Librefs must be 1 to 8 characters long, must begin with a letter or underscore, and can contain only letters, numerals, or underscores. After you assign a libref, you specify it as the first level in the two-level name for a SAS file." can be come "Librefs must be [...] to [...] characters long, must begin with a [...] or [...], and can contain only [...], [...], or [...]."  Doing this will create 7 flashcards, one with each deleted phrase.
• Other times, basic flashcards work well.  For example, chapter 3 in the certification guide lists a number of common SAS coding mistakes and there associated symptoms.  Each symptom can be the front of a flashcard, and each symptom can be the back of a flashcard.
• My tendency when coding is to write the first thing that comes into my head, knowing that the syntax will probably be a bit off and that I'll have to fix a few errors before the code will run.  The SAS certification exam requires that I be able to read some code and figure out which snippets have syntax errors, which will run normally, and which will run but have logical errors that will cause incorrect output.  It's a hassle, but if you want to become really proficient with a language I think it's good to have practice looking at lines of code and detecting which will error and which will run properly.

Coursera - Passion Driven Statistics Assignment 2: Frequency Tables

I'm taking another MOOC - Passion Driven Statistics!  Mostly I chose it because it the class includes free access to SAS OnDemand.  SAS training is ridunkulously expensive... the listed price for the the course SAS Programming Introduction: Basic Concepts is currently 1100, and the combined cost for the two courses they recommend as preparation for the base certification come to around $3.5K.  So why not get some training for free with Coursera?


Anyway, I'm using some data published by Pew.  The data was in SPSS format, but it's easy to import to SAS.  Here is my code & output for the second assignment:


Code

libname mydata "/courses/u_coursera.org1/i_1006328/c_5333" access=readonly;

data new; set work.VALUES_MERGE; 

/*Change labels for race and education */

LABEL RACETHN="Race and Ethnicity"

EDUC="Last Grade Completed";

/* include only those who always or nearly always vote */

IF OFTVOTE <= 2;

/* Exclude all who did not vote or voted for a 3rd party */

IF PARTY > 2; 

/* Exclude those who didn't vote for a major party candidate */

IF PRESVOTE <=2; 

/*Treat Don't Know / Refused to answer as missing data. */

IF RACETHN = 9 then RACETHN = .;

IF PARTY=9 THEN PARTY = . ;

IF EDUC=99 THEN EDUC = . ;

/* Let those who voted for the dem be 0, those who voted for repub be 1.

This will allow us to see % repub by doing an average of PRESCATEGORY*/

IF PRESVOTE = 1 then PRESCATEGORY=0;

ELSE IF PRESVOTE = 2 then PRESCATEGORY=1;

PROC SORT;  by respid;

/* create the frequency tables */

PROC FREQ; TABLES OFTVOTE RACETHN EDUC PARTY;

Output

The FREQ Procedure

How often do you vote? oftvote Frequency Percent Cumulative Frequency Cumulative Percent Always 3866 55.74 3866 55.74 Nearly always 3070 44.26 6936 100.00

Frequency Missing = 258

Race and Ethnicity racethn Frequency Percent Cumulative Frequency Cumulative Percent White Non-Hispanic 6084 85.39 6084 85.39 Black Non-Hispanic 469 6.58 6553 91.97 Hispanic 314 4.41 6867 96.38 Other Non-Hispanic 258 3.62 7125 100.00

Frequency Missing = 69

Last Grade Completed educ Frequency Percent Cumulative Frequency Cumulative Percent 8th or less 163 2.27 163 2.27 Some H.S. 329 4.59 492 6.86 H.S. Grad 1899 26.48 2391 33.34 Tech/Trade 334 4.66 2725 37.99 Some College 1804 25.15 4529 63.15 College + 2643 36.85 7172 100.00

Frequency Missing = 22

Party Identification party Frequency Percent Cumulative Frequency Cumulative Percent Independent 6522 93.21 6522 93.21 No preference 371 5.30 6893 98.51 Other party 104 1.49 6997 100.00

Frequency Missing = 197