College Course Advice–Five Things You Should Know Before Taking Statistics 101

Of the over two million college degrees that are granted in the U.S. every year, including those earned at accredited online colleges nationwide, probably two-thirds require completion of a statistics class. That’s over a million and a half students taking Statistics 101, even more when you consider that some don’t complete the course.

Everybody who has completed high school has learned some statistics. There are good reasons for that. Your class grades were averages of scores you received for tests and other efforts. Most of your classes were graded on a curve, requiring the concepts of the Normal distribution, standard deviations, and confidence limits. Your scores on standardized tests, like the SAT, were presented in percentiles. You learned about pie and bar charts, scatter plots, and maybe other ways to display data. You might even have learned about equations for lines and some elementary curves. So by the time you got to prom, you were exposed to at least enough statistics to read USA Today.