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The "Official" Top 10 Reasons why so many students dread Stat 231

(Introduction: For many years, the words "Stat 231" struck fear to almost all mathies here at UW. If you ask someone who took the course before, you are almost guaranteed to hear a series of negative adjectives. Everyone has his/her own reason for detesting the course. The following is just a compilation of reasons from a few people who took this course last fall.)

  1. Student's confidence will follow a Gaussian distribution, where the x-axis represents time.
  2. The prediction interval for a students probability of enjoying stats is (0.1,0.2).
  3. After collecting the data and performing some analysis, the conclusion is that the average mark is 55% with standard deviation of 5%.
  4. After applying the PPDAC method, one realizes that the degrees of freedom he has after taking the course is 0.
  5. The least squares estimation will yield the lowest mark one can get.
  6. The hypothesis that one will fail has a significance level of 0.5.
  7. One's probability of having a breakdown is a binary response model, with a 95% chance of a "Yes" response.
  8. A random student has a 90% confidence interval that he won't do well in Stat 231.
  9. No student actually understands student's t distribution.
  10. The student's marks will have a K-distribution.

If you have already passed Stat 231, good for you. You have conquered one of the toughest courses you'll ever take. You can read this list and laugh (unless you don't want to laugh). To those who are taking or haven't took this course, prepare for the worst and good luck (You'll need all the luck you can have).

Jason "the Screamer" Lau
(Along with the help from a couple of brave souls who took Stat 231 last term)