Math 143
Probability and Statistics
Fall 2006

Course Home Page

Course Description

Instructor

Randall Pruim
office: North Hall 284
phone: (616) 526-7113
E-mail: rpruim@calvin.edu

Time & Location

Section D

Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 2:30-3:20, in North Hall 295

Office Hours

My schedule is still being determined, but it looks like I will usually be available immediately before class (1:30-2:15). I will also usually be available immediately after class for short questions. If none of these times work for you, feel free send email, or just stop by to see when I am available.

Internet Resources

Email

I will maintain an email list of all students registered in this class and will occasionally use it to distribute information and reminders of various things pertaining to this course. If you prefer to read your email from an account other than your calvin student account and do not have it set up to forward automatically, send me email with the email address you prefer.

Please check your email daily. You are responsible for any information communicated via email.

Web Pages

In addition to this home page, I will also maintain a list of web resources pertaining to this course. You are responsible for any information appearing on the course web pages. Items I have prepared and maintain online include

• a customizable calendar of daily readings, lecture topics, exams, homework etc. (Last modification: Tuesday, 14-Nov-2006 08:58:05 EST.)
• a list of homework assignments and due dates.
• information about tests and exams (appearing shortly before each test date).

For quick access to these and other resources, see the navigation bar at the top of this page.

Other Important Information

See me

If you are having difficulty with any portion of the course, do not hesitate to see me. Do this as soon as possible, certainly well in advance of any deadlines (like tests) so that we can work to fix the problem.

Textbook

The required text for this course is The Basic Practice of Statistics (3rd edition) by David S Moore.

Grading

Grading will be based on the following approximate weighting:

15%	Homework, Labs, etc.
60%	3 Tests (see calendar for tentative dates)
25%	Final Exam (Tuesday, Dec 12 , @ 9 am)

Tests should be taken when they are scheduled. I do not generally offer make-up, alternate or late tests. Instead, if you miss one test (for any reason) or if your final exam score is better than your worst test, then your final exam score will be substituted for that test.

Technology

In this course we will use the statistics package R to ease our calculations and visualizations, and to perform various simulations. You will probably also find it useful to have a calculator.

R is a very powerful statistical tool and programming language and is being actively developed by statisticians from all over the world who contribute to the main program, its interface, or the many add-on modules (called packages) that are available to handle specialized tasks. To make learning R easier, we will make use of a package called Rcmdr (R Commander). R is free and available for Mac, PC, or Linux, and I encourage you to install it on your personal computers. It has also been installed on the computers in the Mathematics and Statistics Computer Lab (basement of North Hall) and may be installed on some other machines around campus as well.

For more information on R, see the R resources page for this course.

Special Circumstances

Occasionally there are special circumstances that require that the rules and guidelines above be adjusted for a particular student. In such cases, it is the responsibility of the student to inform me of the situation as soon as possible, so that the appropriate arrangements can be made. This includes, but is not limited to, students with documented disabilities.

This page maintained by:
Randall Pruim
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Calvin College
rpruim@calvin.edu