STAT 6130

Professor Tang is a king! Literally one of the nicest professors I've had in the stats department: I literally don't know anyone who took the course who didn't like him.

Breakdown: 30% HW; 30% Midterm; 40% final project (so fairly standard grade breakdown for a stats class).

Lecture: Lectures were usually highly theoretical. The content is pretty interesting and intersects well with other graduate stats classes (especially 6190). Overall, I don't necessarily know if attending class was super necessary. I kinda stopped going towards the end of the semester (after the first midterm). HW can generally be done without going to class, but the midterm is based heavily off of lecture material so I would at least try to attend frequently for the first half of the course.

Midterm: Super easy if you paid attention during class. You get a cheat sheet front and back you can make and bring to the exam which was definitely helpful. The hardest part was honestly the T/F at the beginning which was mostly questions he talked about during lecture not on the slides which is why I recommend attending lecture for the first half of the course at a minimum.

HWs: He said there would be 5-6 HW but we barely had enough time to get 4 in lol. They're all pretty straight forward. The first two take MUCH longer than the latter two in my experience as the first ones are way more proof based than the other two which rely much more on computation in R. The slides will be your best friend for these homeworks so make sure to use them if you get stuck.

Final Project: 5% 1 page draft of project outline (basically completion); 15% presentation; 20% final written report. Pretty standard project. He just asks you to find a dataset and analyze it using the methods we learned during the course. The written report is supposed to be 10-15 pages single spaced which at first seemed daunting but wasn't really that bad (plus me and my partner literally basically wrote the entire report in one sitting and did fine on the project).

Overall, this is a great stats elective to take. Great professor, interesting content, and not hard to do well in.

#tCFfall2021