Advanced higher stats (maths)

hi everyone i was wondering if people could help tell me if the stats course is better for than the pure course and what each course involves i got an A in the higher and enjoyed the maths so ive decided to continue it for 6th year. So what are the key differances between the pure and appied versions of the higher?

Reply 1

TheUnbeliever

better for than

Better for what?

I would strongly advise against replacing the pure course with statistics unless you're not going to be studying a physical science or other maths-based subject at university. Rather, take it as a supplement. Stats is structured such that 2 units are statistics and 1 unit is the catchily-named 'mathematics for applied mathematics', a strict subset of the main maths course.

The rigour and level of mathematical ability it instills is much lower than the main maths course (in that respect, mechanics is better - although it still isn't a replacement for the main course). It is, however, independently useful and interesting. I also think it's a very straightforward course, which contains quite a lot of learning a cookbook method and recognising when to apply it, rather than requiring substantial intuition.

In summary: the main maths course includes a fair quantity of calculus (several types of ordinary differential equations, some more work on practical applications - volumes of revolution, trivial mechanics - and a few other techniques such as integration by parts). You're also introduced to a few more trig functions, cover the Binomial theorem (expanding expressions of the form

(a+b)^n

), some basic arithmetic and geometric series work, do a little more algebra. The other 'big' thing in the course is cookbook proofs (direct, reductio ad absurdum, induction).

The statistics course covers some distributions, ways of testing the statistical significance of deviation in samples (and some methods of sampling), some expectation algebra (i.e. calculating the expected value and variance in random variables which are combinations of other random variables) and a little statistical thinking (independence, identical distribution, 'virtually certain' etc). As I say, it also has a cutdown version of the main maths course - I took the two together, so I wasn't taught this separately and have no idea what it specifically contains.

Reply 2

andi-fsm

TheUnbeliever

The statistics course covers some distributions, ways of testing the statistical significance of deviation in samples (and some methods of sampling), some expectation algebra (i.e. calculating the expected value and variance in random variables which are combinations of other random variables) and a little statistical thinking (independence, identical distribution, 'virtually certain' etc). As I say, it also has a cutdown version of the main maths course - I took the two together, so I wasn't taught this separately and have no idea what it specifically contains.

Soz for butting in...
I'm planning on self-teaching AH Statistics this year.
A couple of quick questions

1) Did you use any specific books/notes?
2) Does the Statistics course involve somekind of project/experiment thingy? :s-smilie:

There's not much info on the SQA website.

Reply 3

TheUnbeliever

andi-fsm

There's not much info on the SQA website.

We used Maths in Action for questions (they produce one textbook for each unit - Statistics 1 & 2 :rolleyes:

) but all of our notes were produced by the teacher, so I can't comment on the quality of the notes in the textbook, sorry.

In terms of investigations: sort of, but not to nearly the same extent as in other subjects. There are two investigation-type outcomes but they are pass/fail only. The first for us involved doing some calculations and graphing the efficacy of a couple different methods of testing whether a certain delivery of stock was more defective than was acceptable. That took maybe an hour or so. The second involved taking a large number of samples (200 in all, which led several people to just invent the data) from two books by different authors and then doing a test to determine whether you could identify the separate authors by word or sentence length in a sample of their work. Including collecting and sorting data (the actual descriptive prelude and following test took very little time) took several hours.