Principles of Statistics Feedback

[soltran]

I doubt that I have much to offer that hasn’t already been posted on the forum but on the off chance that I do include something that is of help to someone here is my experience with the statistics test. Keep in mind, I passed with a 61 but as my score suggests, I am no authority on the subject and I freely admit that I went into this test under prepared. This is definitely not something that I would suggest.

Test – Statistics Computerized Version
Questions – 100 (the test actually has from 1 to 101 questions but question 1 is information only (z table data etc) and doesn’t require an answer)
Time – 120 minutes
Other – Calculator was allowed (didn’t look for or even notice if there was an online calculator)

General Observations

There was no easing into the questions. The first two questions I faced were possibly the most difficult questions on the test (for me at least with my limited preparation) and could have quite easily set the tone for the rest of the test if I had allowed it to. I guessed and moved on. Of the first 10 questions I was only sure of answering 2 correctly and can understand how some people may have considered abandoning the rest of the test, but luckily it wasn’t all like that. I found that the time allowed was adequate but I did keep a close eye on the clock as I wasn’t expecting to finish with much spare time left.

My Savior

Being under prepared and getting off to a slow start was a worry but there were a few things that saved me. I am pretty good at the probability questions and there were a few like

You have a box with 7 red balls, 8 blue balls and 10 green balls. If you randomly select a ball 1000 times, placing it back in the box each time, approximately how many red balls would you expect to have selected.

You toss a coin 1000 times what is the probability of getting exactly 1 head.

You have two independent events. Event A has a probability of 0.6 while event B has a probability of 0.3. What is the probability of both/neither happening etc.

There were also a number of probability questions that contained obvious wrong answers such as using the word exactly, for example

You have a standard fair coin that has a probability of 0.5 for heads and 0.5 for tails. If you toss the coin 1000 times how many heads will you get?
Exactly 500
Approximately 500
etc

There were a number of simple graphing questions such as;

A distribution curve skewed to the right with a question asking which is bigger the median or the mean
A scatter plot (and there were a few of these) asking if relationship was positive or negative or none
A stem plot asking for the median, mean or mode

There were also a number of simple descriptive statistics questions such as

Of the following sets of numbers which has the largest standard deviation
Of the following sets of numbers which has the smallest mean

There were plenty of questions on significance, hypothesis, confidence intervals and regression lines.

I was lucky enough to find enough questions in my comfort zones and/or lucky with my guessing but I did manage to get through it. My recommendations are:

Be as well prepared as you possibly can be
Do not panic even if things seem to start badly
Read every question carefully (there was a question like - the mean of set 1 is 27, the mean of set 2 is 33, what is the median of set 3)
Believe in your ability

Best of luck to all

Regards

[ShotoJuku]

[SIZE="3"][COLOR="Blue"]Congrats!!

Your post is very informative - Thanks!![/COLOR][/SIZE]

[steelers]

What did you use to prepare for the Stats and the college math exams?

[soltran]

What did you use to prepare for the Stats and the college math exams?

I used IC, CliffsNotes Statistics (CliffsAP) and CliffsNotes Statistics (CliffsQuickReview) for the statistics (but didn't spend nearly as much time as I should have).

And for the Mathematics you can check out this post.

Regards

[sgloer]

Very informative post, thanks for taking the time to do that!

Soltran's experience highlights the importance of time management on these tests. Don't get caught up in one or two questions and get discouraged--every question is worth the same, so knock out the easy ones first.

[xn85turbo]

I took this test last month and to be honest it was the hardest for me since I hadn't been in school since 1988. The real deal is to know the concepts of the type of math (know the formula, not how to solve the problem).

You really don't have to solve that many math problems but its good to know them because they are not that easy. The part that I got tons of questions on and studied little for was Null Hypothesis (Idoits guide to Statistics will help greatly here). The rest like SD and the such are very easy and IC is a great resource.

This test freaks people out like myself because math is much more advanced than what they taught in school 20 years ago. If you can find a scholl that still give this test in paper form try to do it that way since liek most it took me 3.5 hours and the 2 hours for the electronic is added stress you don't need. Also if you can hire a tutor for an hour or two to explain some of the problems to you as it will make life easier.