<p>Next year I’m doubling up in AP Stats and Advanced Pre-Calc. From what I’ve heard its pretty easy, so I’m sure I’ll pass it with a high A. I’m more concerned on what I’ll do and if it will be fun. The College Boards description makes it seem as though it will be fun and have projects where we do our own study and analyze them, which sounds pretty cool to me since I have AP Comp as well so I’ll have at least 2 classes to be creative (I really dislike art and have mostly math, science classes, and a Russian class, not very free when it comes to projects). Is my assumption true? Also, what exactly will I be learning? Things like I did in the Stats and Probability chapter of Advanced Algebra 2?</p>
<p>Yeah, you do have a more in-depth probability/chance unit (although the whole class is basically a discussion of chance). You also learn about different distributions and how to conduct a study or a survey from a statistical point of view (how many trials, randomization, what kind of sample to take). On a side note, you finally get to learn how to use many of the functions a graphing calculator provides, haha. Most classes also have you design and carry out a study and report the results, which is what I think you’re talking about.</p>
<p>It’s a pretty fun class since it has so many applications in the real world. But be warned, there’s a lot more writing involved than you might expect.</p>
<p>What do you mean by more writing??You have to write essays??</p>
<p>I’ve written actual essays for math classes before, but you probably won’t really be writing essays…just analyzing your results and explaining things.
FWIW, I want to be a math major and I dislike statistics…I don’t think you can really tell in advance whether you’ll like it or not.</p>
<p>I did the same set up last year. AP Stats is not really a math course, its more of a humanities course that includes lots of numbers. Half the course is Descriptive Statistics and the other is Inferential Statistics.
In descriptive statistics its all about finding probability, mean, standard deviation, lines of best fit (least squares regression lines), and working with normal distributions.
Example problems that you might have to do is like, if a company is making pipes that have a mean diameter of 5 cm and standard deviation of 0.3 cm, what is the probability that two randomly selected pipes fit? (pipes that fit are considered to have a difference of diameter of ±0.4 cm)
In inferential statistics, its using statistical tests to see wether a result can be attributed to chance alone, or if its highly unlikely for it to happen and thus its statistically significant. An example problem that you‘ll have to do is say, a medical company is trying a new drug to cure the flu, they give the medicine to 100 patients and they give a placebo to 80 patients. After a while 70 of the patients given the medicine displayed no flu symptoms, while 50 of the placebo patients showed no flu symptoms. Does the medicine make a difference? Here you‘d be looking to compare the distributions of proportions and see if the result is feasible by chance or if its statistically significant. </p>
<p>With regards to writing, its mainly in the Inferential Statistics that you‘ll have to write a short conclusion saying wether the result is significant or not, explaining why, and what does it mean in the context of the problem. Like in the example above you‘d end up saying like “Because the p-value is less than .05, the result is significant at alpha level of 5%. This means that we must reject the null hypothesis and conclude that the new medicine does significantly improve flu patients‘ symptoms“</p>
<p>I‘m the best math student in my High School and I did really well in the class (only one that got an A in each semester and a 5 on the exam despite being the only sophomore) yet some of the better students that were seniors (people that got 5‘s in Calc and Physics) struggled throughout the class / dropped the class midyear</p>
<p>All I did was sleep… #APNaptime</p>
<p>And I still passed the exam</p>