Stats Help Needed!

[marianne202]

Ok, so I finish my last two classes at EC in two weeks and now the only thing standing in the way of my BSHS conferral is stats. I have put it off to the end out of fear, but not I'm at the point of no return. I'm registered with ALEKS but only hit 54% on my first eval. When I work on my pie I seem to check off one area and lose ground in another. So I'm wondering about trying to tackle the DSST stats exam. Is it doable for a non-math minded person? I haven't taken a math class since 1980! OMG, that was a long time ago! I'm thinking I will try the DSST then if I don't pass tackle ALEKS or I could just get a really good book and keep trying the ALEKS assessments with the book to help me solve the problems. I bought a TI BAII plus calculator, but I'm lost using it. If anyone has any suggestions please, please send them my way. I have the Khan academy videos bookmarked, but have only watched one so far. My plan is to throw myself into stats starting next week and immerse myself into it. I would like to have this completed by the end of August one way or another. Any suggestions on other study sources, good books etc? I think part of my problem is I have created a mental block for myself, so I'm hoping by totally focusing on just stats I will learn to love it and figure it out, or I will hate it even more and tear my hair out! Although that would cut down on the salon bills! Any help is greatly appreciated!

[peace123]

Aleks is doable- you only need to get 16% more to get ACE credit.

Print out the examples of the problems. I ended up with an entire binder full of samples... these helped me during the assessments.

[MISin08]

I liked having a user friendly book about the concepts, as ALEKS is short on the 'why' and I found just making myself plow thorough was slower than learning it for real banghead. I used Idiot's, though a real textbook would have made me happier (I took more stats later on, which may not apply to you). Good luck.

Phillip

[irnbru]

Peace and MISin08's advice is very good. Having good notes for reference is really useful.

I found statistics to be quite hard, too. Although I'd completed courses in maths for credit, when starting stats it was all new and pretty alien work.

Like a lot of maths, introductory courses in a particular area can be painful due to the way concepts and methods build on each other and accumulate. In particular, starting from first principles, doing the probability, then moving on basic statistical methods, then applications and tools was tricky because at each stage it's almost a completely new perspective.

If you can realise that each stage leads on to and supports the next, that it's a cummulative process and most importantly, that maths is about doing maths (and that means practice), then it helps ease the pain a little.

The format of ALEKS' maths problems gets pretty samey. Also, the assessments are progressive, i.e. if you are correctly answering problems, the system keeps giving you the next topic problem. You can usually gauge how well you are doing in an assessment when questions you've never seen before start appearing. If you follow the other posters' advice, you will eventually hit 70% in an assessment If that means tackling, cataloging and sorting individual problems, so be it!

To be honest, I'd rather do ALEKS than attempt the DSST. As always, with the learning process, each day you wake up after studying the night before, you will have assimilated a little better understanding. Sleep is the great learning enabler

Good luck!

[mtompkins]

Not exhaustive but I found some of this content useful:

UsableStats: Tutorials, Calculators, Consulting and Statistics Help

[Meghan25]

I took the DSST Principals of Statistics exam today and passed. I'm not a mathematical thinker and I've had trouble understanding/doing math since grade school. I used the "Against All Odds" FREE online videos for statistics and those helped a lot. The exam was 100 questions, I used my own non-programable/non-graphing calculator, and took the entire 2 hours to finish.

The things that the exam covered the most were Standard Deviation, Mean, Median, Mode, Probability, Standard Error - I had a lot of questions with this formula, t-statistic for sample means, Confidence intervals for one sample mean (z and t statistic) - although just being familiar with using confidence intervals is enough
Binomial Distribution formula - I had one question where I used this
Slope of a regression line (both formulas)
Intercept of a regression line - the test will stress some of just knowing how a regression line works and being able to put one together

I got the above list from someone else who'd taken the exam and passed, here on this site. It really helped. I also used different study materials. Books, videos, online quizzes, and a CD rom. I checked out the books from the library so they were FREE, so were the instructional videos I used and the online quizzes. The only money I spent was on the book with the CDrom and I think I used that one the least. Again, I studied for 2-4 hours a day for about 2 weeks and passed with only basic math skills to start. If I can do this, anyone can. I got the minimum passing score recommended by ACE of 400 but I still passed so it was worth the effort. Good luck to you!