Thank you PaigeMiller! You haven't addressed why there are so many degrees of freedom, this seems like an incredibly large number. - We have more than 300,000 observations (the data is student by course level transcript records from multiple cohorts of students from an entire four-year public college system) However, from the ABSORB documentation Several variables can be specified, in which case each one is assumed to be nested in the preceding variable in the ABSORB statement. So your two models are not equivalent. - I see. What I would like to do is to absorb studentID and courseID which are not nested within each other. Is there any model that SAS would allow that? Also, from the documentation When you use the ABSORB statement, the data set (or each BY group, if a BY statement appears) must be sorted by the variables in the ABSORB statement. -- Yes, I sorted the variable before running the command.
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