What do you learn in University Statistics? Is it hard?

Nothing and yes.
I took it for Psych, if that makes a difference. Bummed homework off my roommate the whole time.

You learn statistics.

I don’t agree with @sliceswiththings. I hated statistics when I went through it, and struggled to understand it, but 30 years later, I had to relearn it at and am in the process of relearning parts of it work as part of Six Sigma training. Business decision making is becoming more and more data driven, and you need statistics to quantify business decisions. Depending on what field that you are going into in social sciences, and how much research based work you plan on doing, statistics can weigh heavily into the type of work you do.

I wish I had better mathematical grounding when I took it. The professor was not a native English speaker, and was very difficult to follow in class, and the text book was very dense. I really struggled, more than I should have.

If I had to do it over again, I would start the semester with a tutor, to make sure that I grasp the concepts right from the start.

The most important thing I learned from taking statistics courses is too never trust statistics.

One thing you will learn is to calculate statistical power. For exmaple you want to know if woman are more likely to vote Republican, so you ask 100 women and 100 men which party they vote for. 76 women say the vote Democrat and only 70 men say they vote Democrat. Have you proved your theory? Not really since that difference is too small for that sample. The statistical power is too low. Can you see how this type of math is important in social science?

I loved statistics as a student. It made sense. I went on to teach it for several years and helped many students overcome their math anxiety at the same time.

I partially agree with @jeffgoldblumsprivatefacilities. The single most important thing you’ll learn in a class like that is how to check data and tell whether or not someone’s making up statistics or if they’re really valid, especially in surveys.

If this is important to you, you basically have to pay attention to a couple important terms in the class. These are sample size, question bias, and demographic. For example if you’re trying to find out what single mothers think about abortion, you’re going to want to ask the question neutrally (in the case of bitter divorces or un-terminated rapes), define your demographic (in this case, single mothers, but you might want to narrow it down to say, Wichita, depending on who you are presenting the findings to) and sample size (so if it’s a nationwide survey, surveying 50,000 may or may not be enough, but if it’s in a small town, 50,000 woman may be the entire population, and you can scale back from there. A good estimate to work from seems to me to be 40–80%. Anything less than forty you can’t generalize, and greater than eighty, you might as well just interview the entire population).

Don’t take my word for any of this though, especially the numbers. I might have just made them up. ;)

Actually, in Statistics, you learn, based upon your population size, exactly how large your sampling has to be in order to achieve varying degrees of deviation from the mean. Or, in other words, based upon what degree of error your view to be acceptable for your results, how many samples you need to take from your population in order to have confidence that you findings are correct.

@PandoraBoxx yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say. Been a while since I took the course

Ahhh, alright, thanks everybody.

Is it a difficult course?

I had to take three grad stats courses for my masters and enjoyed all of them (minor in biostats, so I may have had a propensity to enjoy them, but with an n of 1, well, I can’t say much more).

The content is very understandable IF (and this is a giant if) you have a decent professor. At my university, there were a couple of stats professors that kept being elected teacher of the year (they were in the agricultural college), but they were worth having as instructors because they deserved those teacher of the year accolades.

The statistics subject in my course focussed on statistical analysis of research groups, with the aim of determining the significance of results in medical research. A lot of what we did was based on the computer program SPSS, using functions like Chi square, tests of normality, T tests, and ways to manipulate the data to appear closer to a normal curve.

I have forgotten a lot of it already, and it was only first semester 2009 that I studied it. The hardest part is staying awake long enough to work through the concepts. Apart from that, it isn’t too hard (just as boring as watching grass grow).

I took basic university-level Stats and it was all about finding probabilities and using data to infer information about various things. The first half of the class I didn’t find terribly difficult (it at least made sense to me), then it was like, all of a sudden, I had no idea what was going on and struggled for the remainder of the course.

You have to stay on top of it and ask a lot of questions. A lot depends on the professor and the text. Statistics uses a different type of math than what you would have been exposed to so far, so you really need to put in the study time.

It depends on the exact course.

The main thing you will hopefully learn is how to use careful planning and some plain old common sense combined with mathematics to try and figure out what actually relates to what in a natural phenomenon, and what just seems like it does.

It can be hard, and it can especially be made hard, but if you keep in mind that the math is there just as “an extension of natural logical thinking”, as one statistician I know put it, it should help.

It can be fun too.

I learnt:
Correlation and expected value.
Combined probabilities.
Bayes theorem.
Discrete and continous stochastic variables.
Probability distribution functions and probability density functions.
Different common statistical distributions – uniform, normal, poission and others.
Hypothesis testing.
Chi-squared (X^2)-test.
Common statistical pitfalls (biased sampling, etc).

I’ve had a lot of use for it both in real life and other courses, so i suggest trying to pay attention.

I found it pretty abstract and difficult (it was the first course where i actually failed the exam), but very rewarding once I “got it”.

Oh and also, the coolest thing of all, the central limit theorem. It explains why everything around us normally-distributed. Statistics is worth taking only for understanding the central limit theorem!

There are different types of statistics courses. I’m an undergraduate in psych, so right now I’m in the “Intro to Statistics for Psychology” class. Here’s my experience:

When you first look at the textbook resist the anxiety because the first few weeks are very straightforward, and built up my confidence. Then things got more complicated, but if you keep up you should be okay. Here is my best advice for success (seriously pay attention): buy a notebook and start by writing the key terms, then summarizing the chapter. Record all the formulas, steps, etc. Then do all of the “homework” questions in the textbook (on separate loose papers put in a small binder) and any additional programs you are using (I use SPSS and MyStat Lab by Pearson). Make sure you finish learning and practicing a certain chapter BEFORE the lecture on it. That way your questions will be clarified by the prof. This will optimize how much you get out of your lectures by eons. If you haven’t even studied what the lecture is on beforehand then you’re just going to sit there in a panic (I’ve been there).
Please don’t fall behind, when that happens then stats becomes even more overwhelming than it already is. Write the date of when you start each chapter and gauge how many days per chapter of work it takes you (I work on this for about 2 hours everyday). Then you won’t fall into denial if you get behind. You’ll know based on the number of days it takes to do each chapter/start the next one. When I don’t have dates recorded I tend to pity myself and take “breaks” even when I’m destined to fall behind without realizing.
GO TO ALL OF YOUR LABS. This is one mistake I’ve made this semester. They are very easy and you are graded on them. Simple mark boosters right there. Another helpful resource is peer tutoring. I go with a friend to a tutor every once in awhile (we combine our free tutoring hours). This provides that one-on-one help with going through steps.
Make a list of formulas and symbols as you learn them. This helps to make it all a little more manageable.
So, for what you will learn: frequency tables/histograms, mean, median, mode, central tendency & variability, z scores, samples and populations, then hypothesis testing, one-tailed/two-tailed, the distribution of means, standard errors, confidence intervals, then effect size, power, t test for single sample and for dependent means, then for independent means. Then you will analyze variance and that is the farthest my class has gotten. That was all in order by the way.
When are you starting the course?