STAT 2120

I took it with Maria Ferrara (her first time teaching the class) over the summer. I'm not a math person but I took and did fairly well in AP Stats in high school. If you took AP, a lot of the class concepts are similar and you can kind of skate by on that knowledge until you get to the latter part of the class where you learn multiple linear regression. I got an A but had to work on statistics basically from getting up to going to bed every single day for 4 weeks. Exams are 40% of the grade and are fair and easier than the labs and practice questions and the averages were high (80-90% I think), but the labs/hw/project are a horrible amount of work and oftentimes you have to do and submit them before you even understand the material they're on. It's "doable" to get an A, especially if you are already good at math/stats/Python which I'm not, but I became a sad shriveled husk of a person to do it. She assigned about 3-4 hours of lecture videos per night which had no business being that long because she sometimes posted Richard Ross's videos on the same content and his are like 30 minutes each when hers are 1 hour and 15 minutes each. 3/4 of my group members dropped out in the first two days of class because she assigned 4 hours of DataCamp Intro to Python assignments on top of watching 4 hours of lecture videos a night and working on 2-3 hour labs in which we needed to use Python but still hadn't learned it yet. The class really does seem to trip over itself because it goes so fast and you are told to do and turn in assignments on concepts you don't yet fully understand. However, the large amount of labs/hw/lecture quizzes/peer reviews pads your grade especially since she drops the lowest few scores in each category and gave a bit of extra credit on the exams. If you really want to or really need to take this class over the summer, I would say do it because I did learn a lot and there was a bit of cushion to boost my grade if I didn't get great marks on some assignments. Professor Ferrara and the TA Brandon were available nearly all hours of the day and made a lot of effort to help answer questions and clarify things for people through multiple office hours and answering questions in the teams chat with fast replies. However if you are looking for a casual or fun class, I would not recommend this because if you want to stay afloat at all, you need to put in serious effort.