Over the last six-plus years that I have taught BUS233, I have noticed some characteristics of students who do well in the course. This is anecdotal evidence, for sure, but I think worth considering if you are facing 233 with a bit of trepidation.
Students who make a B or Better…
- Ask a lot of questions.
- Choose a stats technology quickly – Excel if you have basic spreadsheet skills, StatCrunch if you don’t– and invest the time to learn to use it to crunch the equations.
- Spread their work in the course out over the week – they do not wait until Sunday afternoon to start.
- Make a detailed handwritten notebook of how they work problems with sketches. They supplement the paper notebook with a digital one using Evernote or OneNote or just an Excel/Word document.
- Learn the language of statistics – how to read word problems looking for keywords and phrases.
- Memorize a few key concepts (not equations) early in the term.
If I had to pick the most important, #1 is #1.
