<p>Here's an FYI for you all,
My AP Stats teacher just got back from the AP National conference in Las Vegas the other day. So I was speaking to him, and he says that College Board is going to bump up the difficulty of AP Stats. They say this because they never wanted AP Stats to be a "second tier" math course compared to calc, wherein the better math students take calc while the less-capable students take stats. They were supposedly talking about bringing stats up to the difficulty of calc for the upcoming years. Maybe that explains why weird questions like #6 from this year showed up?</p>
<p>THIS IS A CONSPIRACY AGAINST ME!!!....</p>
<p>'they' knew that this was the year i was going to self-study AP statistics. i hate collegeboard!</p>
<p>ah well, i'm still gonna self-study.</p>
<p>There are two ways to view this:</p>
<p>1) Great. People will actually take this seriously
2) NOOO!! I WANTED AN EASY 5. :'(</p>
<p>Personally, I'd rather take a challenge.</p>
<p>Yeah, if you still don't believe me, here's the original message my teacher sent me:</p>
<p>Quote from my AP Stats teacher concerning AP Stats at AP National Conference:
"one important item was that the College Board claims that it was never
their intent that AP Statistics should be viewed as a "second tier "
course compared to Calculus. In other words, they never designed the course with the idea that the top students would enroll in Calc and the "poorer" students in Stats. Their intent is to increase the difficulty of the
Stats course until it is equivalent to Calc."</p>
<p>I asked about this on the AP statistics teacher email list, and several replies say there must have been some miscommunication here. Some of the AP stats teachers say that, yes, if you really understand the statistical concepts you have learned something perhaps as hard as AB calculus, but others say, no, there is NO effort on the College Board's part to raise the MATH level of the AP statistics test. The AP statistics test is based on a first course in statistics with heavy emphasis on statistical ("science of data") concepts but minimal mathematical prerequisites. </p>
<p>See </p>
<p><a href="http://www.statland.org/MAAFIXED.PDF%5B/url%5D">http://www.statland.org/MAAFIXED.PDF</a> </p>
<p>for more about the difference between a course in statistics and a course in mathematics.</p>
<p>
[Quote]
Maybe that explains why weird questions like #6 from this year showed up?
[/Quote]
</p>
<p>Um...according to what my Stats teacher told me, FRQ #6 is always supposed to be hard and require you to extend your knowledge. Two years ago it was a hypothesis test on sample variance - something we had never learned in class.</p>
<p>Oh yes, I remember that test. That was annoying as hell.</p>
<p>Okay, I'll ask my teacher for further information about this matter, so I can figure out what's really going on. I figured sooner or later, someone would give us their own, or another teacher's perspective on this. It would probably help if I could find more teachers that went to the National Conference... I apologize if I scared anybody. </p>
<p>Yes, I know #6 is supposed to be hard, but this one seemed more "think outside the box" than what I saw in previous years.</p>
<p>All of the #6 questions on the AP statistics free response section every year are supposed to extend the concepts covered in class--they won't deal with something that was directly covered in your homework. That's a chance for students who can apply conceptual understanding to unfamiliar situations to shine.</p>
<p>This is silly. Calculus AB is already the easier of the two classes. AP Statistics actually requires critical reading skills. Calculus AB isn't even as difficult as the Pre-Calculus subjects.</p>
<p>Calculus usually always has the best distribution in just about any school. This isn't just because the better students take Calculus AB. Students in my school took the Physics B, Calculus AB or BC, and the Statistics this past year. They considered Statistics to be the toughest course (even over Physics B).</p>
<p>By the way, the word from the AP statistics teachers email list is that no course changes are planned for AP statistics. You will know (about any AP course) that changes are coming if those changes are announced in the official course description for that course.</p>
<p>You know what? I have to agree with you that Calc is easier than Stats in a way since Calc is more straightforward and direct, while Stats requires more thinking and justification. However, the general consensus among the public from what I've seen is that Calc is the harder of the two. In my school we're required to take either AP Calc or AP Stats senior year, and the lazy people normally pick AP Stats, and then whine about it because it's so hard.</p>
<p>Thinking + justification >>>>> straightforward</p>
<p>Seriously, I've seen many students who have taken both, and the word "Explain" or "Define" is much more scary to them than "integrate" or "evaluate". Chain rule, related rates, substitution to integrate...all are considered far more simple than deciding whether to use a matched-pair t-test or a 2-sample t-test.</p>
<p>I'd say the two harder math courses are Comp Sci and Stats. Calc is too standard at the AB level, and isn't that much more difficult at the BC level (though trig substitution and Taylor Series at least make Calc somewhat presentable as a difficult subject). Boolean algebra, logic, and iteration forces Comp Sci students to think. Sets, probability, critical reading of technical jargon, what affects Type I and Type II error, and decision making of tests forces Stats students to think. Many Calc students don't contemplate and analyze; they just recognize tyeps of problems and follow step-by-step procedures.</p>
<p>Btw, College Board can already see that Calculus receives about 20% scores of 5 while Stats receives about 10%. How will making Stats more challenging help this deficit?</p>
<p>College Board could very easily make Statistics impossibly difficult. Engineering students at the nearest state univeristy consider their Statistics class to be tougher than either Calc III or Calc IV or even any Engineering class such as Structures which requires crazy systems (requiring ugly use of matrices) with multiple integrations all over the place. AP Stats could easily focus more on probability which is one of the toughest math subjects. Combinatorics can make your brain hurt more than AP Physics C E&M. The Sets used currently in AP Stats is simple. What if 4-cirlce Venns or 5-circle Venns are used? Combinatorics, sets, and even boolean algebra can lend themselves into disgusting probability charts and trees (which the AP avoids). Even calculus could be thrown into Statistics. College level Statistics will often throw in integration by parts, for example.</p>
<p>Higher level combinatorics and probability could make Statistics FAR more difficult than Calculus BC and Comp Sci AB. Even Physics C E&M students would have difficulty dealing with situations that comboed circle or ring permutations with repeated permutations in some strange probability tree.</p>
<p>You have to go pretty far down the rank list to find universities that consider Calculus AB and AP Statistics as equivalents of their own courses on the same material. Professors' opinions tend to be less generous than the official AP credit policies of the universities, because they can observe the preparation level of the students. It is not a safe assumption that getting some free credits means that anyone seriously believes you learned anything in the high school AP.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I'd say the two harder math courses are Comp Sci and Stats.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Haha, this is funny because I self-studied these as a sophomore, but I'm going to be learning Calculus at school as a junior.</p>
<p>calc is def harder than stats... but both are still easy. i do agree that #6 on stats was really hard this year though, i dont even know if i was sure on any of my answers</p>
<p>bump...............</p>