Help me pass my test!

March 18, 2008 5:32 AM

What to include on my Statistics midterm cheatsheet?

I have a midterm tomorrow in my graduate program's required introduction to statistics course. It is open book, and in addition to our text, we are allowed to bring three sheets of notes in with us. I suspect that I'll use the notes more frequently during the test than the text (text really only for referencing z table and t table)

So far, according to the syllabus, we have covered the broad topics:
* What is an "argument"
* Research Design
* Measures of Central Tendency, Measures of Dispersion
* Normal and Binomial Distributions
* Sampling
* Basics of confidence intervals and test stats
* Distributions, t and z intervals

Seeing the above topics, what do you think are the vital definitions, concepts, formulas or examples that I should include on my four pages of notes? Recommendations for basic and easy-to-understand reference material welcomed too.

I know that some of what I should include depends on the material that the professor has stressed, and that for obvious reasons you all don't know that. But just assume this is the most general, introductory (but graduate level) course in statistics.

Oh, and I do go to class and have pretty extensive notes, but I'm asking this just to make sure I've got everything covered and perhaps to discover alternative ways to understand basic stats concepts.

posted by jk252b to science & nature (4 comments total)

I'm assuming you use a graphing calculator instead of the z-score tables. You might bring written instructions about how to solve specific types of problems (z-intervals, which tests do what on the calc, etc.) Those are the things my students forget most often. If you go back through the homework you've done, most likely you can categorize the problems pretty well into three or four groups per chapter. One sample problem from each might be helpful. (If you don't use a graphing calculator, you might consider doing that. Normalcdf and Binomalcdf are really helpful and quick.)
posted by orangemiles at 5:44 AM on March 18, 2008

I had a biostatistics class with a similar testing policy. Instead of bringing in a cheatsheet, I used tape flags to mark every chapter and section in the assigned reading, along with the names of key variables introduced in those sections. At the end of the course, the book had 60 tape flags.

If you are allowed to do something like this, I highly recommend it. I got perfect scores on most of the exams.
posted by grouse at 5:45 AM on March 18, 2008

It's tough to say exactly what definitions and formulas would be helpful without looking at your text, though I have taken an intro stats class before and imagine they wouldn't be very different. But it's really not that hard to decide what things are important and three pages seems more than enough to write down all the important concepts from the topics given above. What I usually do when I have an open book test like this is to go through the book starting from the first chapter. Then, any time I see a definition (most books emphasize these by bolding them or something), I write it down. For example in your case I would write down the definition of an argument, of a mean, a median, mode etc. , of variance and standard deviation, and the frequency distributions for a normal and binomial distribution etc. At the same time also write down every formula used in an example by the book or used in a homework problem. Make sure you understand how to *use* the formula. There's no point writing down the formula if you can't figure out what quantity goes where when faced with a real problem. If there's any problem or example you had a lot of trouble with write down the solution to it so that if faced with a similar problem in the exam you can refer to it. Write small so you can cover everything in the space allotted. If you're running out of space to write things down, write down page and paragraph numbers for the relevant information. As far as possible try to do this only for the concepts definitions and examples and not for the formulas -- it's really nice to have handy sheet nearby with all the formulas on it. And it's really nice that your professor is allowing you to do this and telling you to do this. There's nothing more frustrating than hunting through a huge textbook for some obscure formula when you have just 10 minutes left on the test. All the best!
posted by peacheater at 7:37 AM on March 18, 2008

Your classmates and TA's are the best people people to answer this. Do they post on metafilter?

Other wise the answers are for general stats, not for the class, and midterm you're taking.
posted by oblio_one at 8:01 AM on March 18, 2008