Relating Preadolescent Growth to Maternal Height

Using height to demonstrate correlation is, well, super cliche and I'm definitely guilty of using it when teaching intro stats students. So imagine the irony I felt when I realized that my two-day take-home PhD qualifying exam was on modeling heights of all things. Oh well, so is life. As far as the application goes, the outcome is unceremonious: taller moms have taller kids, duh. The real magic for me was in comparing regression models. Starting basic with an ANOVA and moving up eventually to Baysian mixed effects models, all tied together by residual analysis. It is admittedly a little dry, but with only two days and the pressure of a committee of professors deciding my grad school fate, I'm pretty happy with the narrative and balance of technical detail. And hey, I passed; maybe cliche isn't so bad.