STAT 2020

I took AP stats in high school and stats always seemed fairly straight forward and easy to me so I'm not sure if this review will be applicable to everyone. I thought this was the easiest 4 credits of my life. The labs were annoying to go to but a joke for the most part if you watch the lab videos. The exams had some tricky multiple choice questions but there were not many at all. The homework can also be annoying but they weren't bad. Every week there was a synchronous lecture which also sucked to go to but only a little over 2 hours a week for synchronous sessions (lab+class) for a good grade is worth it. Maria was also very nice and approachable.

Professor Ferrara's class is a great class to take as a beginner Statistics class. Although she does tend to overexplain concepts— which can deem to be a little much, does help to reinforce test prep in the long run. This class was online when I took it and I really liked the concept that the lecture were asynchronous with a "discussion section" being one of the lecture days to go over practice problems. Labs were slightly relevant to the topics and also provided a background with using R. Overall really great class and an easy A.

The professor: Honestly I loved this class, and I thought Maria was truly an effective professor. She explains everything, and I mean everything (including every detail and method) very slowly, and I absolutely appreciated this!! I'm a snail when it comes to learning math/stats, so I really appreciated her explaining things that way. As the semester progressed, I started to increase the speed in which I watched her YouTube videos, and I highly recommend the following: go through the slides first and take notes on the writings etc., then watch her videos on 2x speed. It's a lot faster and more efficient than watching and copying her videos on 1x speed or pausing on 2x speed, and without pauses, you can learn things a lot better without breaks in them. Maria makes herself readily available literally every day of the week, multiple times a day. I've NEVER had a professor be this available before, and I appreciated that literally any student could have a chance to meet with her. She is kind, a bit quirky, and definitely helpful with her explanations. Loved her!!

The class: There's asynchronous days to watch her videos on Tuesdays, and live classes on Thursdays. I had to do this class during COVID. She used Teams instead of Zoom, and we would get assigned to random groups on Thursdays to do the class problems/participation. If your group mates slack, absolutely don't put their name on the work and let Maria know. I wish I was more vigilant about this during my time taking the class. We also had labs on Tuesdays, which were fine. If you have 4 people in your group, you can easily get the labs done in 25 minutes tops. However, if you have 3 people, it can take most of the time. If you have questions about the labs, I'd say to ask once during lab and then to go during a lab OH and double confirm. Sometimes it can be really easy to lose points on labs, which make up 20% of our overall grades. My group would often ask a TA to check things, and he would say they're right, and then we'd get them marked wrong by our grader. Labs can be an easy grade if you let it, but you just have to make sure that your stuff is right! Homeworks, we have them weekly and we get 2 attempts on each problem. If you have any issues with understanding a homework, just go to OH and Maria will gladly clarify them (same with the YouTube video grade scope quizzes). Finally, you'll have 3 exams (2 exams and a final, which is just an exam 3). I'd say make sure you read every detail carefully, including the fine print to make sure you don't miss any points. The exams are timed, and they can be kind of difficult to take with poor or spotty internet.

Grading: I think the grading is fair, but because this is such a large class and it's online, mistakes may be made at times. Definitely make sure you check your quizzes and your exams and labs to make sure no mistakes were made. Besides that, I thought it was pretty lax and fair (for exams). I would say this class is an easy A- for sure. If you put in the work, an A would be attainable absolutely!

If you're looking for an easy, pre-health related stats class this is it! It's basically an intro stat class with a sprinkle of biology-related problems and I enjoyed it as someone who'd never taken stats in high school. I will say that Maria assigns a TON of outside class work including 2 topic videos that are usually over the typical class time of an hour 15 and on top of that assigns an hour long lab video for your 50 min lab, weekly homework, 2 topic quizzes a week, and 1 synchronous lecture and lab on top of all this. In her topic videos she goes through everything extremely diligently and slowly and I don't know anyone who watched it at anything less than 2x speed. This class is very time consuming but I won't say it's too difficult. If you put moderate effort into every assignment, you'll end up with a decent grade in this class. She also provides practice exams which are super helpful for preparing for her 3 exams which aren't really cumulative either which is a nice bonus. Also, lab is a complete waste of time; you basically learn R but it's never used on an exam and I don't feel like it's a good use of a lab. TLDR; loooots of work, but easy. Maria is super nice and approachable. #tCF2020

Maria is super nice! She dropped our worst grade on homework, lab, and quiz, also ignore three absence without reason. Should be easy A if you take good note watching the video, do homework and practice problems before exams. Don't have to do reading, video includes everything. Remember to be friend with your labmate.

Coming from someone who has never taken a statistics course, this class was very straightforward. You go over a chapter or two every week and there are three tests throughout the semester, including a final, which is not cumulative. The professor's lecture videos were informative and easy to follow. The labs were relatively simple as long as you watched the lab videos. If you put in a reasonable amount of work, you should get a good grade.

I enjoyed this class. It was definitely challenging, even in covid, so don't take it unless you are willing to put a lot of work in. Maria is a very thorough lecturer and a nice person. She teaches you to code in labs, which I found to be very interesting. Maria is very much the professor who's syllabus is final. She does not round (even if you are 0.01 away) and her tests are challenging. That being said, getting an A level grade or even a B+ is very much achievable.
#tCFspring2021

I took this class since I saw that a lot of pre-med students typically do. It was probably the easiest class I had this semester, very doable for a first-year student. During this online semester, Tuesdays were asynchronous and basically OH while Thursdays involved about a half-hour of group-work and then the rest of class was her going over the problems from said group work. The exams are fair and shouldn't be too challenging if you go over the slides and post-lecture "quizzes". Since our tests were open-note this semester, having a well-organized "cheat-sheet" on hand helped too. Labs are where students learn to use R for analysis. If you have any programming experience at all, it should be a breeze. And if you don't have programming/coding experience, it still shouldn't be too hard since Prof.Ferrara makes the instructions very clear.

I didn't go to OH at all so I didn't have much interaction with the professor, but she seems really nice. She was super prompt about responding to questions on Piazza, and I'm sure a lot of students appreciated that.

I recommend taking this if you're looking for an intro stats course and/or want to get some basic familiarity with using RStudio.

#tCFspring2021

took this it sucked!! i wouldn't say it was "hard" material wise, but the amount of work it took from week to week was just too much and the lectures are so hard to get through. by the end of the semester i had to watch them on 4x-5x speed to be able to get myself to pay attention. we had weekly homework assignments, daily quizzes, lab, lab prep video (around an hour), lecture videos (around an hour and a half), a lab project, and 3 exams throughout the semester. if you have to do this for a pre-req, you'll get through it, but otherwise i'd recommend taking 1601 or something.

This is a really great survey of statistics with an applied biological lens. I don't think you need to take this class AND another introduction to statistics because the class is 98% statistics and 2% biology (all of the problems have bio applications, but you only learn a couple topics that are, conceptually, a true intersection between biology and statistics such as specificity, sensitivity, and PPV).

During a COVID semester, the class was set up in a way where there were a couple asynchronous videos to watch a week with topic quizzes for each on gradescope (quiz material came directly from the videos). The topic videos were about an hour each, but I watched them sped up and took notes, so it probably took me 2 hours total to watch the videos, take notes, and finish the quizzes every week. There was also a lab component where you watch a lecture tutorial before Tuesday's lab. The lab portion of the class probably took about 1.5-2 hours a week by the time I watched the tutorial and completed the lab with my group. Besides a 10-15 question weekly homework, the final portion of the class consisted of synchronous groupwork on Thursdays that takes up the whole "lecture" period.

Overall, this is one of those classes that looks like it has a ton of work, but once you get on a schedule, it is very routine and not that bad to complete. Maria and the TAs were very nice, and questions on Piazza were always answered pretty quickly.