Khan Academy puts the FUN in Fundamentals with the AP Stats Course
My Course Progress
I rely heavily on internet courses and certifications to brush up on skills. Before using Khan Academy I thought of it as a study aid for kids. That changed when I was looking for a fundamental course on SQL. The Khan Academy SQL course was a god send and truly made for beginners. There were lots of practice problems in a structured environment with great feedback. Since then, I’ve played around in the calculus and computer science courses.
For #100daysofdatascience I’ve committed to running through the entire AP statistics course and then taking a mock exam at the end. The complete 2012 exam is posted online so that will be my go to. I am about halfway through the course and here are my thoughts so far:
I have used descriptive statistics pretty much everyday for the last decade. I regularly use inferential statistics and more complex descriptive statistics for modeling and machine learning. These tools are fundamental to hypothesis testing. It takes a lot of motivation to force yourself to go through subject matter you already know but the result is that I have a renewed confidence in my stats tool kit and a fresh grasp of the fundamentals. That said, I will warn that the course can be a bit frustrating at times. Occasionally the questions are a bit subjective or very strict on format of submissions. This is also true for the AP exam and doubly true for most online courses so it’s not especially surprising. It does make things go a bit slower, especially for a perfectionist that wants to get every question right!