Accelerated studies at Northcentral?

thanks

I had go bag a resident PhD Economics program in late 2003 for financial reasons, so I'm pretty tuned up quantitatively. The DL courses are loaded with busy work, but that's life.

 

I have one more lesson in stats...what a relief it will be to get that over with.

Bill Hurd

 

Bill's comment

Just curious. I gather that SPSS is the program of choice for NCU courses. Is there a student version or something, as this is a brutally expensive program? Also, should one figure 16 weeks for this, of could it be done in half that time?

 

Re: Bill's comment

There are at least two stats mentors, each using a different text. IF you use the Aczel text, an accompanying CD has 57 Excel templates that will get you through. I probably only used 8-10 of them though.

After you get started, email me if you hit roadblocks. [email protected]

 

Re: Re: Bill's comment

This is the text book for the stats course I have coming up... (with Dr. Young). I must say that this is the one ... and only course I'm not looking forward to. Oh the anxiety of statistics...

 

NCU stats

If I understand the "foundation" requirement correctly, the first stats course is really a basic understanding of stats, such as would be presented in a basic MBA program core. I just don't know for sure, but NCU's program, and DL programs generally, are very very applied. I'd guess this means that rather than applying the calculus behind the derivation of the estimators, or using linear algebra (calculus is to blunt a tool) to manually solve for a linear regression model specification, learners focus on interpretation of results generated by software applications. This applied rather than theoretical focus would vastly simplify the methods sequence I'd think. A typical B & M departure point would be calc III/linear algebra. I really dont' thing NCU gets into the theoretical side too much. I hope this is the case, because I don't have time for proofs and code writing in MatLab.

 

Re: NCU stats

That's pretty much it. The vast majority of each week's work is reading a chapter, then answering 4-5-6 or so questions at the end of the chapter, usually with the aid of Excel templates. There are 4 case studies, but they are also answered with the aid of spreadsheets. You have the symbols to contend with, like hypothesis, summation, i, mean, standard deviation, etc, but that is just a bump in the road. A very good foundation course.

Bill H