STAT 2120

Good luck with Richard Ross. Overall, the class is uninteresting, poorly taught, poorly managed. Even the TA asked me if the first midterm would be online or on paper minutes before we had to start the exam, since the professor was late and evidently lacks communication skills with his LTA’s. He says that we do not offer him feedback, which could be very well true, but he is not the most welcoming professor. If this course is a prereq for you, I would advise you spend the bulk of your studying in stats. He rushes through the material and throws together a half baked exam, and according to previous years is vary particular about verbiage, meaning you must absorb this man’s brain waves to get an ounce of an idea of what he wants from you. This is not a review of someone scorned. This is review of someone who has dealt with people of many types and it doesn’t take a conversation to get the idea of what kind of educator RR Is.

A classic comm school pre-req that unfortunately sinks your GPA. Most recent test had an average of 60 after he curved it. If you want to do well, go to as many P2L sessions as possible and do review far ahead of exams + make an amazing cheat sheet.

I'm going to give a fairly lengthy review, and considering that this semester did not go too well, I'm not sure how relevant this will be if he changes the course structure in the future. However, I'll try to throw in some more general information about how to succeed in 2120. To begin, there's a lecture quiz after every lab and lecture, and overall they're not too bad, but they did suck this year because they were 30% of the grade and getting even one question wrong on a quiz gives you an 80%. There's also weekly homework and two labs a week. In my opinion, these were very easy. Ross posts all the necessary code on Collab, so all you really have to do is change the file name and numbers and it should be fine. It never took my group more than 20 mins to complete the labs. HW took over an hour on average but was also pretty doable. For me, the biggest issue with the course was the fact that all the HW and labs are based on python whereas the exams require actual statistical knowledge. The best way to prepare for these is to go over the lecture videos and solution vidoes (2x speed works fine). Even if you dutifully take notes in class, I found that skimming through the recorded lecture videos again before the exam was helpful because Ross would go over things more conceptually. Ross usually tried to be helpful, but sometimes I found him abrasive in office hours, so I also did teach myself some of the content with Youtube videos to make sure I really understood everything conceptually. Ross is VERY BIG on concepts. Also, make use of your cheat sheets. I basically wrote out all the lecture material in very small hand-writing, which made the exams a bit easier. Anyways, to study for exams just go over anything you don't understand 100% and also test yourself by making sure you know what tests to run and which code to use. I like to be lazy, but this is definitely a class that requires more active studying and actual engagement with the course content. The LTAs are okay and the UTAs are pretty useless (they often had no idea how to help and sometimes gave out the wrong information) but they're nice enough. The midterm project is an easy grade boost and the final project was a bit annoying, but still possible to do very well in. Make time to meet with Ross or the LTAs to make sure you don't make any dumb mistakes on the final paper, and you should be able to bet on getting a B+ at minimum and ideally an A. Anyways, this class was annoying mostly because I felt like it was too easy to just copy and paste stuff for the HW and labs and I always felt underprepared for the exams, but I ended up doing really well in the class so it's possible to just teach yourself everything before the exams. People really disliked the exams, but I thought most were very fair, and Ross usually gave everyone credit for the really difficult questions that everyone failed. Even though he seems like a stickler, and sometimes he is, he does find ways to curve and save people's GPAs.

This is a weed out course but if you enjoy statistics and data analysis then you will ultimately enjoy the class. Getting used to the coding portion of the class is difficult but you are provided with all the scripts that you need. There is weekly homework on top of bi-weekly labs that take a good while. Midterms are pretty difficult and so is the final. While you may enjoy this class if you like statistics, I would not suggest taking this course if you do not have any interest in statistics or experience with coding.