Statistics for behavioural sciences class

How much do we have to pay you to let Merlin take the class for you?

Lol @ this thread

I was a graduate instructor for psych stats during the summer, and have TAed the class twice. Not offering, but I'm curious what kind of cash you're offering. That's a lot of time

Hatorade, you should power through this with the help of a tutor - if I had to do it over again that's what I'd do.

Dude, you are so good at video games. (We stealthed our way through snowy forests and then killed Juggernauts in Call of Duty together. I seem to remember you did most of the thinking.) How can you not be able to do a thing? I'm not hating because I don't actually drink Hatorade(tm), but my kneeejerk reaction is to agree with Tuco.

Tuco_sl said:

Hatorade don't cheat your way out of the only real class in your degree.

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This. Of all the things to skip in the behavioral sciences, you skip the statistics? You will be Mr. Mist at this rate.

Hatorade_sl said:

Thanks guys, after much discussion I have decided to do it myself. Saving me 1-2K at least, if I pass I get to put that toward a computer

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Right decision. You will need the understanding you get from this class. Also statistics is just interesting for its own sake.

Hatorade, are you offering me $1-2k to take the class for you?

These courses are pretty abysmal... you don't need to be "good at math" to pass them, because they won't teach you any of the underlying math. It's almost always a course in the most basic operations of SPSS or whatever interface-based statistics tool your university pays for. In a good class, you'll be given simulated data and step-by-step instructions on how to analyze them. In a very good class, you'll go through the motions of testing these assumptions before doing the tests and the instructor will tell you that there is no data set ever that meets them. But half of the class won't pay attention to that part. In an exceptional class, you'd actually work with real data and learn how to deal with such limitations -- not in an introductory course, but one in the second semester. You can count the universities that do this on one hand, and half the class will be PhD students whose undergraduate universities weren't among them.

Lejina_sl said:

By her account, everyone in her college has to cheat in order to pass, so I believe it is safe to say not much teaching is going on there.

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Probably reflects most college classes -- at least the ones where you don't get an A just for submitting half the assignments on time.

The distance education classes at Western Oklahoma State College are still my favorites:Need 3 Quick Credits to Play Ball? Call Western Oklahoma - Athletics - The Chronicle of Higher Education

You can transfer them to "real" state universities and boost your GPA, which apparently a lot of athletes do. They teach you pretty advanced skills over 10 days:

Expectations include:
Creating a new folder in Windows XP.
Learning to maximize, minimize, re-size, and close windows.
Copying, moving, renaming, and deleting files.
Finding files and folders.

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And people wonder why the fuck they're unemployable after graduating college...

Soriak_sl said:

It's almost always a course in the most basic operations of SPSS or whatever interface-based statistics tool your university pays for. In a good class, you'll be given simulated data and step-by-step instructions on how to analyze them. In a very good class, you'll go through the motions of testing these assumptions before doing the tests and the instructor will tell you that there is no data set ever that meets them.

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That is fairly accurate. You could even memorize a statistical analysis flow chart, for social sciences, which makes the process even more trivial. It's pretty rare for undergraduate classes to get beyond the most basic forms of analysis and it comes down to: 1) learning how to use the program, and 2) picking the right analysis and/or defending the one you choose in a way that makes sense.

This is not a math class, as Soriak noted. It's a follow the tutorials in the book for a piece of software class.

Tuco_sl said:

Which universities would be counted on that hand?

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That's actually a good question -- I only know of one course for sure at Carnegie Mellon, which is for undergrads in statistics:36-402, Undergraduate Advanced Data Analysis (2013)

Check out thismidterm, which is posted on the site. That's what a good assignment in the social sciences should look like: here's a problem, here's a data set, now go use what you learned and write a paper with your analyses and findings.

I actually heard aboutthis homework assignment, which came out around the time when a mistake made by two Harvard economists made it into the popular press. Basically, they failed to drag their Excel formula all the way down; once you fix that, their findings change significantly. (Oh yeah, their research was cited by policymakers in Europe for their austerity measures -- whoops.) Turns out that there was much more wrong with the analysis, and that assignment showed undergrads how to do it properly. Spoiler alert: the entire effect goes away and, in some cases, more debt actually leads to more growth. And that's why you don't skip statistics classes... or use Excel for your analysis.

Helps that all the professor's lecture notes are written like a book and available as a PDF free of charge, so a lot of people outside of Carnegie Mellon use it to teach themselves. The perk of being a grad student or professor is that you can just stop by your stats department and there's someone who will take the time to help you out if you get stuck. And the thing with stats is that if you use it, you should continuously refresh your understanding and learn new tools. Some of the directed acyclic stuff in the last chapters of his book is based on publications from 1-2 years ago and lets you do really cool stuff with respect to establishing causality (a huge problem in economics). The computing power to do that just wouldn't have been available even 5 years ago, whereas now you can just create your farm on Amazon and the sky's the limit.

So I figured I'd be save with up to 5 universities, because I really can't think of more than one and have not heard about a similar class offered elsewhere.