<p>My son, a sophomore, is having difficulties with an online course needed for his major. Due to budget cuts at his State U, the course in question has become online only, with a weekly problem session. He has been to tutoring sessions and they aren't helping. I suggested to him that he go to the department and request a paid tutor. Is there any other advice I should be giving him?</p>
<p>What is the subject/course topic?</p>
<p>Statistics. He got A’s in both calculus courses so is not weak in math.</p>
<p>Issues with statistics aren’t always about the math. I struggled with that course myself because I couldn’t understand why the professor jumped from an example using tomato growth rates to one using apple harvest data without every explaining what on earth the results of the analyses could be good for. Only when I had my own data to crunch did any of it begin to make sense.</p>
<p>If he can’t get help from the math department, or from his own department, or from the campus tutoring center, he should find out what equivalent courses can be taken elsewhere live next summer. Bummer I know, but better that than wrecking his life this term.</p>
<p>My son took statistics many years ago and the textbook wasn’t very good. There were a fair number of errors in the answer section which he caught and forwarded to the professor. I looked around for other textbooks on Amazon, but it seems that bad textbooks are the norm in mathematical statistics textbooks.</p>
<p>His recourse was quantitative but also required some theory too (doing proofs). He had no problems with these but he studied statistics the summer before he took the course with a textbook that I picked for him.</p>
<p>I like the idea of a paid tutor - if for no other reason, than to evaluate the course and your son. Son tutored statistics and ran into a lot of students that didn’t get it and students that did get it but just required a hint here or there. A good tutor can diagnose the problem and suggest concrete solutions.</p>
<p>Also - does he know who the other students are? Can he form a study group with other students in the class? If he’s having problems, other students might have problems too.</p>
<p>Study groups do help, particularly if it’s a conceptual issue that is the problem. Sometimes just having a different viewpoint explained works.</p>
<p>I just talked to him. He is going to try the tutoring center again a couple of times and see if he can connect with a different tutor that might be easier to understand. The last two had heavy accents. If he finds one that is helpful he is going to offer him money to tutor him. I will suggest the study group route but his shyness may be an issue for him to ask anyone in his problem session.</p>
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<p>Ditto. I overloaded at the beginning of a term, and drop a class. Stats was one I dropped. When I took it a second time, it clicked enough to do well.</p>
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<p>Lol. Maybe find an upperclassmen majoring in stats (actuary), who is a native English speaker. Offer to pay that person to help.</p>
<p>just because it’s an online course doesn’t mean he can’t study with other people. Have him send an e-mail out to other students in the class and see if they are interested in studying together. That’s an easy way to ask when you’re shy. I was always the quiet one when it came to meeting new people in my classes. One day some guy turned around in class and asked if he could study with me, and he wound up inviting all these people and we had an 6 person study group for each test. We got the best 6 grades in the class. We broke it down by section, each of us worked through issues in our section to become a pro then we tutored each other.</p>