<p>How is that course?</p>
<p>Is it rough?</p>
<p>Is it fun?</p>
<p>Out of all my math classes, including discrete math and combinatorics, i disliked this class the most.</p>
<p>Why?</p>
<p>Is it that difficult?</p>
<p>Conceptually it wasn’t bad. I think it was my teachers fault. Made things way more difficult than they should have been.</p>
<p>Probability rules. Random Variables 4 Lyfe. Make sure to brush up on your combinatorics and your calculus before you take the class!</p>
<p>Statistics totally depends on the professor teaching it. I had a guy that hated teaching the class because he knew nobody wanted to be there, so he made the homeworks really easy (they took maybe 3-4 hours), but then made the tests harder and longer than the homeworks and only gave us an hour to do them. The material itself wasn’t bad, just the professor. One of my friends only got two Bs while in undergrad, and one was in statistics with me. The following semester the rest of our friends took the class with a different professor, and they all got As with hardly any work.</p>
<p>Sadly, if you go into Process Engineering, you’ll need to learn it all over again.</p>
<p>It’s an extremely useful class for most fields of engineering, especially if you want to do any sort of research or testing. I’d highly recommend taking it.</p>
<p>id say it was by for the hardest class ive ever taken.</p>
<p>vblick, do you go to UMD? I feel the same way about that teacher</p>
<p>I took AP stats in HS and really liked it. In college I had to take 2 courses in probability and statistics. The first one was fine…calculus based and somewhat applied. The 2nd one was all theoretical, (still calculus based) and sucked (on a test we had to do things like prove the strong law of large numbers). Statistics will come in handy, i’m sure, but college kinda killed my liking of statistics.</p>
<p>vivace13, what were the names of the courses?</p>
<p>I had the best professor in the whole university for this class, so it was awesome. I really enjoyed the class and the material was very well explained.</p>
<p>It’s far from an easy class though. The class average was somewhere between a D+ and a C.</p>
<p>You can’t tell by the name. Probability and stats can be very easy or difficult, depending on the prof, how much stuff are covered, and whether it’s calculus based and not. I personally think easy classes can be more helpful as the big picture isn’t as easily obscured by all the math. In real world, I doubt you really need to use calculus based probability. It seems to me the only people that actually use it somewhat are perhaps the actuaries.</p>
<p>hmm calc based probabilities are basically half the stuff quants deal with</p>
<p>You mean “quants” in “high-finance”? Yes, I agree and I admit I kinda forgot about that. That’s a very tiny market and that’s why I forgot.</p>
<p>But I was mainly thinking about engineering career anyway. In PE exam, no calculus-based probability is tested and it’s a very small topic anyway.</p>
<p>yea I mean quants in financial ENGINEERING :-p… just kidding but yea…</p>
<p>^there’s so much uncertainty involved that they probably don’t believe in what they are trying to say with those “models”. maybe even a chimp can do a better job sometime…</p>
<p>calculus-based probability comes in many flavors, IMO. at the very basic level, you’d probably only need to understand basic multivariable calculus (i.e. how to integrate).</p>
<p>i’m pretty sure that quants deal mostly with measure-theoretic probability, which is quite non-elementary.</p>
<p>the 1st class was “Probability and statistics I” the second was “Probability and statistics II”…so that probably doesn’t help you. books might help though: I was “Probability and statistics for engineering and the applied sciences” by Devore. II was “Introduction to probability” by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis…probably the most depressing book I’ve ever had for a class.</p>