Academic Conduct: Your conduct in this course, as with all CAS courses, is governed by the CAS Academic Conduct Code. Copies of the code are available from the CAS Dean's office (CAS 105) or as html.. Specifics rules for specific assignments will be discussed in lecture.
The "Golden Rule" of academic conduct is to "Give Credit Where Credit is Due". That is, if you use or consult a source, including a book, journal, web page or person, then cite that source (i.e., give sufficient information so that someone reading your work could determined what information you used and be able to find the source). The details of the form necessary in citation vary greatly from subject to subject, but the basic rule is universal..
If you have any doubt about any aspect of proper citation or academic conduct, ask.
Technology: Information for the course will be available on the course home page. Also, I will occasionally send important announcement via the official email mailing list provided by the registrar. Make sure you are receiving these emails.
You will be allowed to use a calculator for this class, but only as a time saving device. You MUST understand the material so that you could do the calculations by hand if you had to. You do not need a fancy calculator (it only needs a square root button).
Grades: Your grades in the course will be determined by the following:
NOTES: There will be daily quizzes. Since there are 19 non-test class days, there will be 19 quizzes. I will take your 14 highest scores and there will be no make-up quizzes given for any reason. Attendance will not be taken except by the quizzes.
Homework will be assigned and collected to make sure that you are up to date (i.e., quick return of the homework will preclude detailed grading). No late homework will be accepted.
There will be one midterm (2 hours) on March 4 (the week before spring break).
There will be two 50 minute exams. These are really practice exams for the midterm and final and will come Feb. 18 and April 22.
The final (May 6) is worth, by far, the largest part of your grade. In order to do well on the final, you must keep up to date with the material and be constantly reviewing. The percentage of the grade on the quizzes/hw/exams is designed to encourage (i.e., enforce) your keeping up to date with the material.
Course Goals: The goal of this cousre is to provide you with the background knowledge to make you intelligent consumers of statistical information. Having a solid understanding of some of the basic techniques will allow you to appreciate the applications of statistics you see in your professional and person lives. It will also help you to understand what can and what can not be accomplished with statistics.
In order to gain this level of understanding, we will need to do some technical calculations via specific formulas. The goal is not to memorize the formulas as you would a phone number (a sequence of symbols having no meaning). Rather, the goal is to understand the formulas as natural way to quantify some idea. So you should expect as many "essay" questions on exams as there are "computation" questions.
As much as possible, you should discuss the topics of this course outside of class with anyone who will listen. If you can form study groups, that is good. If not, find somebody willing to listen to you describe what you have learned. The more inquisitive this person and the more questions they ask you, the better. This is the best way to prepare for the essay parts of the exam.
Final Comment: Too often the courses students take are thought of as hoops they must jump through in order to reach a degree. This philosophy implies that you only need to keep the material in your head until the final. This is just wrong.
The point of this course is to change the way you view the world. You should end this course convinced that, while making conclusions based on partial information always involves the risk of being wrong, there are well understood ways of quantifying, and hence, living with, that risk.