A “Pre-Training” R Survey

Recently I’ve been working with a client to help their analysts improve their proficiency with R. A major challenge in engagements like this is figuring out the needs of the analysts, as well as their general attitude to the training.

To address this I created a “Pre Training Survey” to use with my client. The results from the survey helped me shape the final curriculum. Below I share the actual survey I created in case it helps someone else:

1. Does R ever frustrate you?
2. Does R ever intimidate you (e.g. you think “I’ll just never get it”)?
3. About how many hours a week do you use spend using R?
4. What sort of things do you currently use R for (it’s OK to say “nothing”)?
5. What sort of things would you like to use R for (it’s OK to say “nothing”)?
6. It is important to me that the training is beneficial to you. What is one result you would like to get from this training?
7. During the training I may get a chance to “Pair Program” with some members of your team. Pair Programming simply means working together on a problem at the same computer. During this time you would get to ask me any questions that you like. Are you interested in pair programming during the training?

Below are a series of technical questions. They are not designed to trick you. Rather, the answers will help me know where to focus my efforts during the training. 

It is perfectly fine to leave these questions blank, or to simply say “I don’t know.” Please do not use google or R to answer any of these questions.

Explain the difference between these two lines of code:

install.packages("ggplot2")
library(ggplot2)

Explain the difference between these two lines of code

x = 1
x = "1"

What do these commands do?

?print
print(1:3)

Consider this R code:

x = c(1,2,3)

What is the output of each of these commands?

x
x[1]
x[]

Consider this R code:

x = c(1,2,3)

What is the output of each of these commands?

x > 1
x[x>1]

Consider this program:

x = c(1, 2, 3)
x = x * 2

What is the final value of x?

What is the output of this program?

x = c(1, 2, 3)
for (i in x)
{
    if(x[i] > 1)
    {
        print(x[i])
    }
}

Consider this data frame:

a = 1:3
b = 1:3
df = data.frame(a, b)

What is the output of these three commands?

df[1,1]
df[1,]
df$a

What does this program output to the console?

square = function(x)
{
    x^2
}
square(10)