Small personal good news....

[sweetapogee]

89. before I started this adventure,

which began as simply taking a single math course, I bought the dummies guide to basic math and pre-algebra. It had been over 30 years since I had done any "maths" and even on my best day my skills were not very good. Anyway, over the course of 5 weeks I worked through the dummies guide, not turning a page until I knew everything on that page.

I then took the previously mentioned Compass Test and actually scored high enough (by a squeeker) to take intermediate algebra. Since my intention was to do this for personal enrichment and not a job, I took elementary algebra instead. I'm glad I did, took my time and got myself back into the swing of being in school. It seemed to me that I had a better grasp of things compared to those who the semester prior took the college course in basic math. I'm still on friendly terms with the professor I had for elementary algebra and he told me that typically about 26-28 students begin the course and on average 5 pass. He has a class this semester where not one single student passed. He is btw, a very good instructor and nice person.

Anyway, most of the students in my stats class are in the health care field or some kind of business program. My college requires social work majors to take it also. The prereq are Elementary and Intermediate Algebra. For your information, Elementary Algebra is basically equivalent to the first year of HS algebra, Intermediate is the second year. In my opinion it is more than that but this is what they say. A first semester elementary algebra student should be able to do all of the required work without using a graphing calculator, (the ever popular TI-84 plus), the intermediate student will need to graph linear regressions on the calc and other things.

The stats student is expected to use both the graphing calculator and either a spread sheet or a stats program (I used statcrunch). All of the work in the second half of the course (the probability portion) I used the TI calculator. While I think the prereq of Intermediate Algebra is a bit of overkill, I doubt that a student that has not taken any kind of algebra class in years or decades would pass it. And not knowing how to use a graphing calculator (by this I mean really know how to really use one) would be a death knell.

I've noticed that the higher up the academic chain you go, the more advanced the class you take, the less students that drop out of the class. Only two students dropped the stats class I was in. I spent 3.5 hours on the final exam and when I handed in my test, there were still 5 or 6 students working away on it. I would say that stats is easier than college algebra/pre-calc, but still it's not easy either, especially the probability portion. One thing I took away from the class is that most people misuse statistics to argue for their point, for or against their pet project.

Anyway daleanime, go to it and enjoy yourself.