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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

This thread is like a slow motion car wreck--too ugly to pass up.

Since it is me who you besmirched, let me whip out my textbooks:

For the LAC stats class, we had Larsen and Marx, "Mathematical Statistic and its Applications."  You damn well better have calculus to follow this book, but linear algebra is less important as the course was less applied.
For the LAC undergraduate econometrics course, we used Gujarati, "Basic Econometrics."  This course did not require linear algebra as a prerequisite, but all the basic intuitions of Econometrics can be derived using only two independent variables.  No if I am not mistaken, the course started using Maddala after my time, but, hey, that over 30 years ago.  (It's not surprising that the course didn't require linear algebra: there wouldn't be sufficient student demand for such a course.)[/quote]

Gujarati is a great book—for absolute beginners. We used to joke that Gujarati was like your grandfather who would put you on his knee and explain everything in simple language. Maddala is also not all that challenging. The thread isn’t about your grad school classes because we’re comparing to undergrad.

A magnet statistics class is definitely the equivalent of a college statistics class that uses Gujarati. Now a kid who wants to *major* in stats or math wouldn’t want to be taking the Gujarati-level class anyway, but that’s a minority of kids. This is a key point that everybody here is missing: not every magnet kid wants to go into statistics and therefore needs to knock out a rigorous statistics track starting in high school. Many of them just want to knock out that statistics requirement for their pre-med or other studies, and magnet statistics is a good way to get there.[/quote]

Gujarati is not a Statistics book; it's an Econometrics book.  See, it says so in the title.  If you can't comprehend the difference, I don't think there is much hope for you.  I agree that Gujarati was pretty basic for me, but not all Economics majors are strong in Math.
And how is it that we are comparing undergraduate courses?  The statement was that the linear regression taught at Blair was equivalent to a graduate Econometrics (I assume that is what you mean, although you've called it a statistics course originally) at UPenn.

(Was it Wharton, Economics in the Arts and Science school, or Applied Economics?)[/quote]

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