INFS5700: INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS ANALYTICS
INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS ANALYTICS
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INFS5700: INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS ANALYTICS
FINAL EXAMINATION
1. Writing Time: 3 Hours.
2. Reading and Submission Allowance Time: 1 Hour.
3. This is an Online Open-Book Exam, your responses must be your original
work. You must attempt this Final Exam by yourself without any help from
others. Thus, you have NOT worked, collaborated or colluded with any other
persons in formulating your responses. The work that you are submitting for
your Final Exam is your OWN work.
4. Release date/time (via Moodle): Thursday, 4 May 8:00am (Australian Eastern
Time Zone)
5. Submission date/time (Via Turnitin): Thursday, 4 May 12:00pm (Australian
Eastern Time Zone)
6. Failure to upload the exam by the submission time will result in a penalty of
15% of the available marks per hour of lateness.
7. This Examination Paper has 7 pages, including the cover page.
8. Total number of Questions: 6 Questions.
9. Answer all 6 Questions.
10. Total marks available: 100 marks. This examination is worth 55% 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.
13. Answers to questions are to be written in the exam answer sheet template
provided. Please ensure that you provide all details required on the cover
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sheet of your Final Exam answer sheet.
14. Failure to submit exam answers with the correct exam answer sheet will result
in 10% penalty of your overall exam marks.
15. 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.
16. The use of any generative AI tools or services to search for or generate
information or answers is prohibited. If its use is detected, it will be regarded as
serious academic misconduct and subject to the standard penalties, which
may include 00FL, suspension and exclusion.
17. This Final Exam is an open book/open web, and 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.
18. Students are advised to read the Final Exam paper thoroughly before
commencing.
19. The Lecturer-in-Charge (LiC) / Exam Referee will be available online (via
Moodle) after the Open-book Exam paper is released for a period of one hour.
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QUESTION 1 20 MARKS
The Gestalt principles describe ways in which we subconsciously bring order to the
things we see. We can use Gestalt principles to make our visual communications
easier for our audience to process.
Consider the following visual, which illustrates actual and forecast market size
(measured by total sales) over time for a class of pharmaceutical drugs.
Required:
Identify which of the Gestalt principles have been applied in creating the
visualization, and illustrate where and how each principle is used?
[max 400 words]
QUESTION 2 10 MARKS
Tension is a critical and often overlooked component when we communicate with data.
The effective use of tension will help us get the audience's attention and motivate them
to engage with the action we want them to take. Consider the following scenario.
You run HR at a company that has historically intentionally filled leadership at the
director level through internal promotions (not hiring externally). Attrition—people
leaving the company—at the director level has increased recently. In light of this, you
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asked your team to build a forecast projecting the next five years based on recent
trends for promotions, acquisitions, and attrition. You believe, based on the expected
continued growth of the company, that unless something changes, you will face a gap
in future leadership talent needed compared to what you’ll have. You’d like to use this
data to drive a conversation among the executive team about what to do. The options,
as you see them, are to better understand what’s driving attrition at the director level
and work to curb it, invest in manager development so you can promote at a faster
rate, make strategic acquisitions to bring leadership talent into the organisation, or
change your hiring strategy and start to fill director-level positions through external
hires.
Required:
(1) Identify the tension that should be highlighted in the scenario. [max 100 words]
(4 marks)
(2) Propose an action the audience can take to resolve the tension you identified in
(1). [max 150 words]
(6 marks)
QUESTION 3 15 MARKS
Imagine you volunteer for your local pet shelter, a nonprofit organisation whose
mission is to improve the quality of animal life through veterinary care, adoptions, and
public education. You help organise monthly pet adoption events, which feed into the
organisation’s broader goal of increasing permanent adoptions of pets by 20% this
year.
Traditionally, these monthly events have been held in outdoor spaces in your
community (parks and greenways) on Saturday mornings. However, last month’s event
was different. Due to poor weather, the event was relocated indoors to a local pet
supply retailer. Surprisingly, after the event, you observed something interesting:
nearly twice as many pets were adopted compared to previous months.
You have some initial ideas about the reasons for this increase and think there’s value
in holding more adoption events at this retailer. You’d like to conduct a pilot program
over the next three months to see if the results help confirm your beliefs. To implement
this pilot program, you’ll need additional support from the pet shelter’s marketing
volunteers to publicise the events. You’ve estimated the monthly costs to be $500 for
printing and three hours of a marketing volunteer’s time. You want to ask the event
committee to approve the pilot program at next month’s meeting and are planning your
communication.
Required:
Complete the Big Idea worksheet for this scenario, making assumptions as necessary
for the purpose of the exercise. [no word limit]
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the BIG IDEA worksheet
Identify a project you are working on where you
need to communicate in a data-driven way.
Reflect upon and fill out the following.
PROJECT___________________________________
WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE?
(1) List the primary groups or individuals to
whom you’ll be communicating.
(3) What does your audience care about?
(2) If you had to narrow that to a single
person, who would that be?
(4) What action does your audience need to
take?
WHAT IS AT STAKE?
What are the benefits if your audience acts
in the way that you want them to?
What are the risks if they do not?
FORM YOUR BIG IDEA
It should:
(1) articulate your point of view,
(2) convey what’s at stake, and
(3) be a complete (and single!) sentence.
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QUESTION 4 20 MARKS
A storyboard is a visual outline of your content, created in a low-tech manner (before
you create any actual content). Based on the big idea you have created in Question 3,
create a storyboard using the pet adoptions pilot program.You can adopt the structure
we shared in the lecture to construct your storyboard.
[no word limit] (10 marks)
Base on the storyboard you created, develop a narrative for this scenario by using the
the narrative arc introduced in this course. Feel free to draw the narrative arc in your
answer.
[no word limit] (10 marks)
QUESTION 5 20 MARKS
Clutter can make our visuals appear overly complicated and increase the work our
audience has to undertake in order to understand what they are viewing. As we
eliminate things that don’t need to be there, our data stands out more. The figure below
shows the time to close deals, measured in days, for direct and indirect sales teams
over time.
Identify 10 (TEN) changes you would like to make to declutter the graph and improve
the visual design. [max 400 words]
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QUESTION 6 15 MARKS
You are an analyst working in the consumer credit risk management sector of the
Bank NSW. One of the key metrics that is used to evaluate a consumer’s credit risk
is called Non-Performing Loan (NPL). NPL refers to a loan which was failed to be
repaid by the borrower for more than 180 days. Despite various collection activities
that have been taken by the bank, many still don’t repay, and this results in a loss.
Banks have to reserve money for these potential losses. Below is a graph that was
created by one of your colleagues, which shows how Non-Performing Loan (NPL)
volume compares to the loan loss reserves over a specific period of time.
Required:
(1) Identify three areas of the graph that is confusing or misleading.
[max 150 words] (6 marks)
(2) Discuss what you would do to improve the three issues you have identified above.
[max 250 words] (9 marks)