STATS advanced maths First year-

[Imran]

Statistics is possibly the most boring field of mathematics that u may be involved with at uni. The lectures themselves are quite useful as reading the textbook is quite tedious.

There is extensive number crunching and I'd advise doing the past exams and knowing the proofs outlined in the the textbook by Phipps and Quine-in the exam the harder final questions are often just directly asking for the proofs.

I'll add more later

[Imran]

For stats quizzes u will most likely be pressed for time-it is vital u are able to apply the formulae quickly-so you really need a lot of practice. The quizzes in stats can also be quite risky with some people coming out with really low marks despite the fact they understand lectures etc-timing and panicking is a big issue in quizzes-the quizzes make up 30%(2 quizzes) so that's a substantial amount of your total assesment. Also doing well in the quizzes will take pressure off you when you go to do the final exam. You might face a lot of jargon, but don't get scared by this, often the symbols used etc mean really simple operations.

U may also use the computer program, used to be R when I was in first year but we found(my friends and me) that it can slow u down quite a lot. I never actually learned how to use R properly nor my friend but we still came out good alhamdulillah. So at the beginning u may see people appearing to be really far ahead because of R in the tutorial-don't worry about it-when you do the quizzes and exams it's more about how well u understand the stats and how quickly u can do the operations than being able to manipulate computer programs.

[Imran]

3u and 4u math from HSC would be useful in the sense probability is strongly linked to stats and a good understanding of proabilibty is required as different models including Poisson's as well as the well known binomial theorem are often used. It also helps to be familiar with power series especially for exponential functions in some of the proofs(power series may sound unfamiliar but u can google it to get a decent enough overview to apply in stats).

So my advise would be to go over the stuff u did in HSC-stats is 2nd semester