STAT 2120

Love this guy! I think this year was his second year teaching this course and although it was online due to covid, I really enjoyed it! It was a synchronous lecture with a synchronous lab. The lectures were very engaging and the PowerPoints on the material was explained really well. Many people are worried about the coding portion of this course but DO NOT WORRY YOU WILL CATCH ON! Professor Ross doesn't expect you to be a coding wiz so just take good notes and pay attention to what he says and you will be good! There are 2 midterms and a final (all very under a time crunch so be prepared) in this course along with a weekly homework assignment which took me about 3 hours to complete and labs 2x a week where you work in a group and complete exercises with aid from TAs. It's not that bad at all. #tCF2020

For Fall 2020, each week had two prerecorded lectures and two synchronous labs. The lectures were pretty to the point and Professor Ross was an effective teacher. The labs were basically problem sets you completed with a group of 2-3 other students. They were pretty enjoyable if you had a good group. The course also had weekly homework, two midterms, a project, and the final. All of those had a reasonable difficulty. The course used Python for all calculations, so it helped to have some prior programming knowledge although isn't necessary.

Ah, Richard Ross. What a man. My main gripe is that he curved the first exam with like 10 points so we thought we were all set for the rest of the year, but tragically, he ended the final with a 76 mean. Also he's just the worst at wording. On the final project, we were APPARENTLY supposed to provide the general form of an equation, but the instructions just said "model," so many of us provided only the model specific to the problem and lost like... 10% on the final project. Luckily for us, our TA was nice enough to let us know what was up beforehand, but most of the class was not so lucky. Richard Ross refused to give people points back which was an unsavory move. The same thing was true of the post-lecture quizzes and the homework.

This class may have been better before it went online, but it wasn't very enjoyable for me. Professor Ross' lectures were not super clear, making it necessary to learn the topic on your own, and if I didn't have prior coding knowledge in python this class would have been a lot harder. The structure of the class was really what I didn't like though, as Professor Ross crammed everything into the last two weeks, although this may have been because of the short semester due to COVID. Overall, it wasn't awful especially if you have already taken a coding and/or a stats class, but it isn't super fun.

If you don't read anything else, just read this: there are not that many office hours each week compared to other introductory level classes I've taken, but they are super helpful to ask questions about topics or the labs and homework and they will help a ton. just go you won't regret it!
This course is a lot of work: two labs and a homework due each week at the minimum. However, the course is not as hard as the amount of assignments indicate. As long as you put in the work, your grade should be fine. Something nice Professor Ross did was to provide all of the labs/ homework/ lecture videos far in advance, so it was easy and helpful to work a few days ahead. I made a habit of starting the weekly homework a week in advance, which helped with managing the course load. We used an online question forum website, and students could get up to 2% extra credit on their entire grade for effective participation there. I highly recommend answering your classmate's question there. We had permanent lab groups (~4 students) the entire semester. Regardless of how good your lab group is, I HIGHLY recommend previewing the lab before meeting with your group. If every member reads through the lab questions beforehand and starts answering questions they know how to do, your lab group will be much more productive. Only 50 minutes is allotted for lab time, which in my opinion is not enough for most of the labs, so looking over it beforehand makes those 50 minutes count more. Prior coding experience (this course uses Python, but any language works) is very helpful because teaching Python is not a focus of the class and can save time.
I don't like that the final project was crammed into the last < 2 weeks, but office hours were super helpful for clarifying the abundant unclear instructions. I don't think this is a very enjoyable class for most students, but there is a lot of information taught. I was unsure whether to go into statistics before taking this course, but I spent a lot of time and learned a lot in return and am overall much more interested in statistics.

This was Professor Ross' second full semester and he did a decent job for his experience. Don't get me wrong there were some portions I wish he would've listened to student feedback for but overall he did his best to be a fair grader within reason. This class was a lot of work and your experience depends a lot on how good/bad your lab group is as you have to do 2 labs a week and then a final project with them as well. If I had one piece of advice it would be to learn python ahead of time if you can help it- he only gives you a week to learn it essentially. Make sure you take good notes and prepare for exams by making sure you understand how every piece of code works and when to use it. Python is your best friend or your worst enemy in this class.

Ross is a decent professor. I think he seems to get more hate/criticism than is deserved. He probably won't be the greatest professor you ever have, but certainly for an intro class like this, he does what is necessary. He also tends to keep his lectures short which is nice. I for one appreciated the class in the sense that it strayed away from more theoretical material and made sure we applied the things that we were learning to real and practical data. Instead of memorizing boring theorems and such, we were taught several important tools for inferential statistics that are actionable. I would say to not be discouraged from taking this class just because Ross is teaching it.

STAT 2120 is a lot of work. Do not take this class at the same time as other difficult classes. I took it with managerial accounting and it was a bad decision. The first two weeks are especially stressful because you have to do an online Python course IN ADDITION to all the regular class responsibilities and assignments. The main issue with the course is that so much content is covered in such a short amount of time, arguably to a fault. The class as a whole does badly on exams, so I suspect people aren't learning as much as they should be due to how crammed the content is. Professor Ross is also not amazing at explaining advanced concepts. Labs help so much because they take his vague and awkward descriptions and make sense out of them through application. Professor Ross is generous with the grading distribution, however, and you do end up with a better grade than you'd expect.

this class is so much freakin work. You truly never get a break. the exams are hard cuz theyre nothing like the labs and homework you've spent so much time on. if you're like me u had to take it for mcintire so you don't really have any options but just go in knowing this class takes up a bunch of time. OH also -- textbook is not necessary at all.

I personally recommend the book if you can find it at a good price because the powerpoints and lectures weren't enough for me to fully understand the material, if not the resources he provides are enough. He gives opportunity for extra credit like posting on campuswire (up to 2% I think) so it's not like he's unforgiving. This is a class where you're going to have to put a lot of time and effort in (like A LOT of time) but overall it's not the worst. I had to take this as a pre-req for something else, but if you're genuinely interested in stats I don't think that this class should be that bad. My advice is to go to OH more if you have any questions because most TAs will check over your homework answers before you turn it in to see if they're right if you ask. Calc 1 is recommended for this class but honestly it wasn't ever used so if you haven't taken calc before I think you can still take this class.
#tCFspring2021