Reply to AP Statistics as a 10th grade elective

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Reviving this as a cautionary tale. My child is taking Precalculus and AP Statistics at the same time, AP statistics is by far harder, and it’s mostly because it lacks the calculus foundation to really understand the material. The teacher is supposedly good being an AP Statistics grader for many years. This is the first time I’ve seen teaching to the test in earnest. The entire class is taught through examples one might encounter in the AP Statistics exam, and there’s zero explanation on why things work the way they do, no background, no derivations, just a stream of formulas to apply. I also suspect the teacher herself doesn’t really understand the material well, graphs shown without labels on x and y, but somehow it should be obvious the probability is the area under the curve. The mathematical language is atrocious, she uses  “density curve” instead of probability density (distribution) function etc. never seen a formal definition of what the cumulative distribution function is etc.

My son is doing well in Precalculus, but struggling a lot in AP Statistics. I would definitely recommend taking it after Calculus. By now it’s quite clear he won’t do well on the AP exam. [/quote]

This is how Statistics is taught in college for non math majors, and why most of published science is statistically unsound. 
It's not a "math"  class. It's an "research tools" class.

BTW, "Probability density curve" is standard but less popular terminology. "Curve" is a synonym for "graph of a function". You even wrote curve" in your own description of the graph!

Google [google]"probability density curve"[/google][/quote]

Statistics is most definitely a math class, and it can be taught in many ways, some better are than others.

When you teach an introductory class you need to stick to clear and broadly used terms. “Density curve” is different from “probability density curve”. I did the google search you suggested, first ten hits take you to “probability density function”, which tells you what the actual standard is.

It’s true that curve usually means graph of a (nonlinear) function, but when you describe a uniform constant distribution by a “density curve”, and never defined what “density” is, it’s just confusing and odd. Again in sticking to widely used nomenclature, it’s common to say “area under the curve” not “area under the function”.[/quote]

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