Advanced Statistics

Professor: Dr. Travis Langley

Textbook: Basic Statistics: Tales of Distributions by Spatz. Plus workbook.

SCHEDULE

Chapters 1 & 2 EXAM: Wednesday, January 27

Chapters 3 & 4 EXAM: Wednesday, February 10

Chapters 5 & 6 EXAM: Wednesday, February 24

Chapters 7 & 8 EXAM: Wednesday, March 10

Chapters 9 & 10 EXAM: Wednesday, April 7

Chapters 11 & 12 EXAM: Wednesday, April 28

Chapters 13 & 14 Last 2 chapters will be covered by half of the final.

FINAL EXAM: Monday, May 10. 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.

Attendance will not be taken on "Dead Days," but the class will meet to review material.

EXAMS

Each unit will conclude with a 40-point exam covering lecture notes, assigned readings, and class discussion. Bring #2 pencils for every test. You're responsible for making certain you erase wrong answers completely. Any answer marked wrong due to an incomplete erasure or smudge is simply wrong. Each test will be part multiple choice and part other stuff.

Unlike Dr. Langley's other classes, we will NOT drop a test because you get to retest.

Each regular exam will be over two chapters. On Mondays, beginning the first of February, you will be able to retest over any chapter. Example: You test over chapters 1 and 2. You do okay on the chapter 1 half but not as well as you'd like on the chapter 2 half. The following Monday, you can take a chapter 2 retest. If your retest score is better than you did on the chapter 2 portion of the regular test, your retest score will replace that half of your grade on the first test. So your score for the first test would now be as follows:

what you originally made on the chapter 1 half of the first test

plus

your score from the chapter 2 retest.

You can retest twice over any given chapter, which means you have altogether up to three shots per chapter (the original test plus two retests) to make your best possible score. Our foremost concern here is that, in the end, you learn the material regardless of whether you learn it at a different pace from someone else.

Makeup tests: There won't be regular makeup tests. To make up a test you miss, you would take the retests for the chapters covered by the test you missed.

GRADING

The scale on the 40-point tests is simply this:

A 35.1 -->

B 30.1 - 35.0

C 25.1 - 30.0

D 20.1 - 25.0

F <--24.0

The professor also reserves the right to assign a course grade of F to anyone caught cheating. Anyone caught cheating will also be referred for University disciplinary measures.

Keep track of your own grades along the way. If you want to keep up with your grades, write down your numerical scores along the way. If you are not in class on the day when a test is returned graded, you can learn the score on that test when the next test is returned graded.

BONUS CREDIT

You can earn bonus credit by helping students in Experimental Psychology with the statistics for their research projects. If you are helping yourself with your own course project, you will be expected to do much more interesting statistics than you might have done otherwise.

You can also earn bonus credit by presenting (as author or co-author) papers at the student research conference if the papers in any way involve statistics.

ATTENDANCE

The number one correlate with poor grades in any class is poor class attendance -- so show up.