duncan@dduck.ctt.bellcore.com (Scott Duncan) (03/16/90)
In article <211@samna.UUCP> jeff@samna.UUCP () writes: > > Get rid of statistics. My own experience (and I've talked >to a few others who agree) was that statistics consisted of learning >a whole bunch of silly formulae and how to plug your numbers into them. >There didn't seem to be any (hmm ... rather than "any", how about >"enough to make it worthwhile") generally useful principles to be learned. > >I considered this to be a complete waste of time. I don't remember >any of the formulae now - in fact I didn't remember them three months >after the course was over. So, if I ever need to use any of the formulas, >I'll have to go look them up anyway and I could have done that just as >easily without wasting a semester on the course. Having recently taken a self-paced course in statistics -- videos, texbook, and workbook -- I can appreciate that this might be the case after a course in statistics. My impression at the end of the 30 hours I spent taking the course was that one needed a computer-based statistical package handy to avoid the drudgery of manual computation and emphasis on formula memoriza- tion. I thought the course I took was a decent intro to the subject, however. The videos were based on a PBS-like series of videos (26 30-minute tapes) which emphasized how statistics were actually used. Yet, the variety of forumlae presentated got rather confusing after a while. I was wondering what other people's experiences were with taking statistics courses? I took this one in order to get a better apprecitation for the kinds of methods and analysis done in software engineering studies, i.e., so I could begin to understand what people's results might mean, including the shortcomings of certain computations and techniques. (I don't think this course that I took completely did that, but it's aimed me, I think, in the right direction.)