Math 171 – Statistical Decision Making

Math 171 was one of my favorite classes I have taken at Longwood so far. It is the entry-level Statistics course that is required by most majors. I not only loved this class because it was math I loved it because I had an amazing professor.

While this math class was not similar to any others I had taken previously I fell in love with statistics. While I enjoyed this class I did find certain chapters a bit more challenging than others.

In this class, we learned how to do many different tests. More importantly, we learned about the different kinds of tests that were available for numerical and categorical data. We wrote two group papers and two individual papers to ensure we understood the real-life application of this material. As you can see below we used real data that was given to use to write the papers for the class. The data that we used was collected by the math department here at Longwood. We used the data and the math skills we learned in class to determine what proportion of Longwood students used or smoked tobacco products. Since the data surrounding these papers were real data collected from Longwood it made it so much more interesting to learn about than just using data from online.

We also learned about bias and credibility surrounding the data we used. Since this was collected from Longwood it was very credible. We were taught how to look at good sources on the internet as well, which will be very helpful when collecting data in the future.

As a student, I learned a lot from this class and cannot wait to take the second part in the future.