CAS MA 113 Instructor: Office: Telephone: Office Hours: TF & TF Office Hours:

Syllabus

Spring 2013

D. Weiner

Dan Weiner (&Teaching Fellow) 246 MCS, 111 Cummington St. 617-353-9546 (email: weiner@bu.edu) Tues 4:45-5:45 pm, Thurs 4:45-5:45 pm, Fri 12:15-1:30pm TBA

Text: Introductory Applied Biostatistics , by DAgostino et al. (Duxbury); manual optional ---additional materials may be posted at learn.bu.edu, check often! Exam I (Wed 13 Feb; note drop without W date is Thurs 21 Feb), 1/4 Exam II (Wed 20 March; note drop with W date is Fri 29 March), 1/4 Exam III (Wed 10 April), 1/4 Final Exam (Wed 8 May, 3-5 pm), 1/4 (Final grades are based strictly on averages and curves as announced in lectures.) Grading:
Homework is not collected except as explicitly announced, but it is expected that students will keep up-to-date with the problems and lecture material. Materials may be posted on the BU course info site (http://courseinfo.bu.edu/). Any mid-term exam grading issues need to be addressed within one class week of exam returns or will be considered moot. Final exams will be held in instructors office for potential review in the Summer I and Fall during regular semester posted office hours, then recycled. Instructors judgment, once given and explained, is final. Grademongering is strongly discouraged. Normally no make-up exams can be offered except for verifiable emergency exceptions made only at the instructors discretion. Precise pace and coverage vary with class. The text is good, but the class coverage (including notation, and level and style of justification required) and notes have top priority in exam emphasis, so keep up with the lectures; plan to photocopy missed class notes from a classmate, as the instructor will not be able to help you concerning missed lectures, incomplete classwork, or missed assignments. Email should be used only for urgencies, as replies are not guaranteed, especially if the question is not appropriate for any reason. You will need a calculator; please bring one to class every day. Lecture and discussion attendance and participation are vital, as is keeping up with the pace of the class. Arriving on time, being prepared for the new material, and leaving only at the end of class, are absolutely necessary to get the most out of this course. Attendance is required and expected at all classes; the instructor is not responsible for student absences nor the consequences of them. We regret that we cannot in general offer appointments aside from our many posted office hours; the math stat department does however maintain a list of private tutors, and other public resources will be announced as they become available. Please plan accordingly. Because of the volume of student usage of our office hours, we cannot reteach material nor restate information from classes missed by the student. Course Objectives: Statistics may be the most important branch of mathematics for the citizen in today's society, and it is important that all of us be confident consumers of statistics in both our professional and personal lives. Our goal in this course is statistical literacy - the ability to think critically about numerical information and to use it as a consumer to come to useful decisions and conclusions. The heart of statistics is data, that is, information- usually numbers- gathered from some study. We will focus on the three parts of statistics: gathering data ("experimental design"), summarizing data ("descriptive statistics") and interpreting data ("inference" or "decision theory"). While good algebra skills are helpful, you will find that much of the course relies on developing intuition you already have- our emphasis will be on quantifying , that is, numerically measuring or describing what you see. Discussions: Every student must be registered in a discussion, and weekly attendance at it is mandatory .