This is the Spring 2016 Statistics class at Marlboro College.

Statistics is the science---and art---of extracting data from the world around us and organising, summarising and analysing it in order to draw conclusions or make predictions.

This course will provide a grounding in the principles and methods of statistics. Topics include: probability theory; collecting, describing and presenting data; hypothesis testing; correlation and regression; and analysis of variance. Two themes running through the course are the use of statistics in the natural and social sciences and the use (and abuse) of statistics in the news media.

Typically Matt Ollis teaches this every spring. He's on sabbatical ths term, and so I'm filling in. My intent is to essentially "be Matt" for this course - teach his course, his way.

The textbook we're using is OpenIntro Statistics. You can download a free PDF from their website, or get a paper copy for about $10.

We'll be using the R statistical software system for calculations and graphs. It's also free, and is a full fledged professional grade tool. (It's a programming language, too, though I don't expect to get much into that in this course.) The OpenIntro Statistics text uses R throughout, and has labs that we'll use to explore it.

We'll meet twice weekly, Tue/Thu 8:30-9:50am, here in Sci217, to discuss and work on the material. Since this is a 4 credit course, you should expect to put in about 12 hours/week, that is, 3 hours in class and 9 hours reading and working problems.

This webpage will organize everything - expectations, assignments, grades, links to materials, and all that. After you log in with your campus username and password you'll see some additional menus on the left. I'll discuss how all that works next week.

For now, be aware that therer's a preparation page that will describe what you should do to get ready for each class. There are entries there now for next week.

No prior computing experience is needed to take the course.

Grading policies and the work expected is described on the syllabus page.

You are expected to be aware of the college's policy on academic integrity and to abide by it. Please come and talk to me if anything is unclear. I'll discuss this further next week.

Questions?

http://cs.marlboro.edu/ courses/ spring2016/statistics/ notes/ Jan_21
last modified Wednesday January 20 2016 9:03 pm EST