[kaitotst]

Lecturer: Dr. Roman Viveros-Aguilera

This is an introductory course in statistical methods and a foundation for upper year courses on statistical inferencing, survey sampling and has a lot of practical value. In my opinion, a very easy course due to how the lecturer teaches and how the course is structured. The topics covered in class were,

1. Basic Plots and Charts (Histograms, Stem and Leaf Plot, Dotplot, Boxplots)
2. Point Estimation Methods (Maximum-Likelihood Estimation, Method of Moments)
3. Confidence Intervals for an Unknown Mean, Variance
4. Hypothesis Testing
5. Covered but not on exam: Simple Linear Regression

The pace of this course is very slow at the beginning since it's very focused on copying notes from the board while the professor elaborates from time to time. These notes are fully sufficient to study the concepts taught in the course. I would say that the assignments and homework questions (of which some are taken from the textbook) are sufficient to study for midterms. Assignments were fair. Some of them required you to regurgitate examples from class and some made you think a little to get the answer. Midterms were straight up regurgitating what was taught in class/assignments and were not hard. The exam was a little harder but overall very fair. The difficulty was doing all 14-16 problems in 2.5 hours, which if you didn't practice a lot could be very hard.

Dr. Viveros is also a very nice guy. Very accommodating (if TAs marked something wrong, he'll change the marks for you) and will do his best to answer your questions. He also teaches a lot of upper year courses so you'll be seeing him around if you do more upper year statistics! Very nice person.

I had an amazing TA and he did his best to tell us tips/tricks for the midterms and exams, but this varies from year to year. Tutorial sessions were helpful to practice problems since most people don't generally do them.

Mark Distribution:

10% for Top 5/6 Assignments (2% each)
20% or 40% for 2 Midterms (multiple marking schemes)
50% or 70% Exam (depending on scheme)