Statistics 2

Basic Course Information

Instructor
John Rice 
425 Evans Hall
642-6930
rice@stat.berkeley.edu

Office Hours:  3:00-5:00 Monday

Lectures
Tuesday & Thursday
2:00-330
F295 Haas

Teaching Assistants
The teaching assistants'  office hours are given below.  You can go to any office hour of any teaching assistant, not just your own.  You can also go to room 307 at any time and you can talk to any GSI who is there.  Even if they are from another course, they should be able to answer your questions.

Andras Erdei:
Aaron Gray:
David Rosenberg:
Amanda Shieh:

Sections
The sections will be primarily used for problem solving and individual help. Quizzes will be given in section.   Homework will be collected and returned and midterms will be returned in section.

Sections will not meet Tuesday of the first week of class. They will meet that Thursday.

LAB 201 T T 0900 1000  344 EVANS merged with 202
LAB 202 T T 0900 1000  340 EVANS Amanda Shieh
LAB 203 T T 1000 1100  344 EVANS Amanda Shieh
LAB 204 T T 1000 1100  340 EVANS Aaron Gray
LAB 205 T T 1100 1200  334 EVANS Andras Erdei
LAB 206 T T 1200 0100  344 EVANS Andras Erdei
LAB 207 T T 1200 0100  340 EVANS Aaron Gray
LAB 208 T T 0100 0200  340 EVANS Aaron Gray
LAB 209 T T 0100 0200  334 EVANS David Rosenberg

Text
Statistics.3rd Edition. Freedman, Pisani, and Purves

This is an excellent book with lots of good exercises.

Course Content
This course takes a conceptual approach to the major ideas of probability and statistics and will present applications to a variety of fields. It will not use much formal mathematics. We will cover most of the text at the rate of about two chapters per week.

Lecture notes will be posted on the class website.   I recommend that you bring the lecture notes to class so that you can write notes directly on them. 

The website also has supplemental material. Please take some time and explore these links occasionally: I hope you find some of them to be fun as well as educational.

I will often show short video segments at the beginning of class in order to supplement and broaden your view of the subject. 

Lectures will sometimes not take a full hour and a half and when that happens, please take advantage of the time at the end for individual questions.

Detailed class schedule.

Calculator
You will need a basic calculator that adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, takes square roots, and raises a number to a power.  There is no need for a special statistical calculator. There will be no sharing of calculators on quizzes and exams.

Grading
Homework
Best 4 of 5 quizzes
Best of 2 midterms
Final exam		 10%
20%
30%
40%
No individual letter grades will be given for any of these components. Your letter grade for the course will be based on your overall score, and will be calculated approximately as follows, based on the weighted average of percentages in each category given above:  A: 90-100%, B: 75-90%, C: 60-75%, D: 50-60%, F: < 50%.  This scheme may be slightly adjusted, depending on the difficulty of the exams.  Based on experience, I expect about 20% A's, 30% B's, 40% C's and 10% D's and F's.  This is similar to grade distributions in other sections of Statistics 2, 20, and 21. I will not tolerate academic dishonesty and will take serious actions if it occurs.

Homework will be handed in on Tuesdays in Section and no late homework will be accepted, except by prior arrangement. Quizzes will be in Section. There will be no make-up quizzes.   If you miss one midterm, your grade will be based on the other. The Final Exam is mandatory--no one will be excused from it or allowed to take it at another time.  Note that the homework assignments and the dates of the midterms, quizzes and final exam are given on the class calendar.

 

 

Email
Email is usually not an effective medium for resolving questions about homework problems, exercises in the text, or conceptual problems. Face to face contact is better.  I usually won't answer such questions by email, but I will answer questions about administrative aspects of the course.  I would also be interested in learning your perceptions about how the course is going.  Ask your GSIs about their individual email policies.

Solutions
Solutions to homework and quizzes will be posted in the glass cases in the central corridor of the third floor of Evans Hall.

Some Advice
Main rule:   do not fall behind!  The material is cumulative. Come to office hours to get your problems sorted out promptly.

Read the text carefully, keeping up with the lectures. Don't read it like a novel.  Do the problems and if you get stuck, look for similar worked exercises.  Work problems by yourself and in small groups--both assigned homework problems and others from the text. Working problems is the major way to assess your understanding and to solidify concepts. Make use of the many resources available to you: text, lectures, section meetings, office hours, the student learning center, and material that will be posted here.