Stats prep course info

Please review the following information for students preparing for the summer stats prep course:

This email is in regards to a “Stats Prep Course” that will run over the last week of August which you have registered for.  The course will run from Monday, August 26th to Friday, August 30th, from 10am to 4pm, with a break for lunch.  The first ~3.5 hours of the day will involve a review of statistical concepts, while the final ~1.5 hours will involve implementing some of these ideas using statistical software.

Where: B151, in the basement of the School of Population and Public Health, 2206 East Mall, UBC Point Grey Campus.

Cost: There is no cost for this course. (Please note that SPPH 400 is not an MHA course. This course is traditionally offered to MPH students and has been extended to MHA students for the first time this year).

Most of the material presented in this Stats Prep Course is a review of topics you should have already learned in previous statistics courses you’ve taken, and will NOT be reviewed in SPPH 400, the introductory statistics course.

Attached is a “self-assessment” to help you decide if you would benefit from the prep course or not. If you are comfortable answering most/all of the questions, then you may decide to opt out of the prep course. On the other hand, if you find that you are struggling to answer many of the questions in the self assessment, you may want to attend the prep course.

The material covered in the self-assessment will NOT be reviewed in SPPH 400, and it will be assumed that you are comfortable with this material in SPPH 400.  Specifically, this material includes:  Samples vs populations and statistics vs parameters, observational studies vs experiments, types of variables and scales ofmeasurement, numerical and graphical summaries of variables, sampling techniques, basic probability concepts, Bayes’ theorem and diagnostic tests, probability distributions, the binomial and poisson distribution.

In the Stats Prep Course, the first 3-4 days will involve a review of the material necessary to complete the self-assessment, while the final day or two of the Stats Prep Course will provide a general overview of SPPH 400. A set of notes for the Stats Prep Course, as well as a more detailed schedule, will be distributed at a later date.

Mike Marin
Instructor