Syllabus

Stat 20: Introduction to Probability and Statistics

Instructor

Jeremy Eli Sanchez

Term

Summer 2024

Welcome to the Age of Data, where claims made using data are all around us: in the news, in the pages of scientific journals, in the policies of government, and in the board rooms of companies across the world. In this course you will explore the forms of claims that are made using data. Some of these are subtle claims about the structure of the data at hand. Others are grand claims about scientific truths or predictions of what will happen in the future. This course will train your ability to critique and construct such claims made using data. The four types of claim that we will focus on are summaries, generalizations, causal claims and predictions. We’ll also take a brief detour to learn about probability, which will help us in this process.

Staff

Instructor of Record: Jeremy Eli Sanchez (jeremysanchez@berkeley.edu)
Tutors: Evelyn Cheng, Christopher Lee, Emma Wu

Lecture time and location

Mondays and Wednesdays: 2-4pm, Wheeler 212
Thursdays: 2-4pm, Cory 77

Lab time and location

Mondays: 4-5:30pm, Wheeler 212
Thursdays: 4-5:30pm, Cory 77

This period can be treated as extra time to work on your assignments. I will be there to help you!

Course Culture

Students taking Stat 20 come from a wide range of backgrounds. We hope to foster an inclusive and supportive learning environment based on curiosity rather than competition. All members of the course community—the instructor, students, tutors, and readers—are expected to treat each other with courtesy and respect.

You will be interacting with course staff and fellow students in several different environments: in class, over the discussion forum, and in office hours. Some of these will be in person, some of them will be online, but the same expectations hold: be kind, be respectful, be professional.

If you are concerned about classroom environment issues created by other students or course staff, please come talk to us about it.

Mode of Instruction

This course is mostly structured as a flipped class, meaning that you will first be encountering new concepts in statistics and data science outside of class. Class time is dedicated to expanding on the work you’ve done outside of class by working through questions solo, in groups, and as a class. On Mondays and during select lectures, we will revert to a more traditional lecturing style.

Before class

Mondays

Finish up your lab or study for your quiz! You can read more about this below.

Wednesdays/Thursdays

It is your responsibility to become familiar with the topics that appear in the course notes and to work through the reading questions on Gradescope by 12 pm Wedenesday (for Weds class) and 12pm Thursday (for Thurs class).

You’re encouraged to experiment to find the method that works best for you: downloading the notes as a pdf and making notes on them, asking and answering questions over the class forum, etc.

During class

Mondays: traditional lecture

The instructor will walk through the material in a regular lecture format using the iPad, mixing in practice questions so you can work on them in groups. Once we cover everything we need to, we will spend the remainder of time working through components of Problem Sets and Labs.

We will be conducting the whole of the probability unit in this format.

Wednesdays/Thursdays: flipped classroom

Class time will be spent on a range of activities, but the most common will be answering concept questions (using Poll Everywhere) that check your understanding of the notes in the first half of class, and then working through components of your Problem Sets and Labs in the second half of class. We will not be walking through the material like on Mondays, so it’s imperative that you complete the reading and the reading questions before coming to class.

Help outside of class

Asking for help does not send a signal that you are behind or need extra help. On the contrary, asking for help early and often tends to co-occur with success in the course. To this end, we have a few options available for you when this!

Instructor OH

The instructor will offer office hours twice a week. Instructors are happy to chat about the course material, statistics in general, careers in statistics, and whatever other statistics or data science topics are on your mind!

Group tutoring

Tutors will offer one group tutoring session each week. This is an opportunity to finish up any assignments that you’ve started in class or review any topics that are confusing for you. Group tutoring is a great place to go to meet other students and collaborate on assignments with tutors on hand to help you get unstuck.

Materials

The primary materials for the course are the lecture notes, which will be posted to the course website in advance of class. We’ll teach you everything you need to know!

RStudio

The software that we’ll be using for our data analysis is the free and open-source language called R that we’ll be interacting with via software called RStudio. As a Berkeley student, you have your own version of RStudio waiting you for at: http://stat20.datahub.berkeley.edu. Most students taking Stat 20 have no experience programming; we’ll teach you everything you need to know!

Course communication

bCourses

We will use bCourses to disseminate announcements for the entire class, such as final exam information.

Discussion forum

The official discussion forum for the class will be hosted on Ed. Ed is a forum to ask and answer questions with your fellow students and course staff. It’s an indispensable resource for learning from your peers and seeking help from tutors and instructors.

If you have a question for staff, create a new post and mark it as “private” and it will go only to course staff. This is the best option to contact us if you have a personal concern. If your question does not include personal information and can be answered by other students, make sure it is public.

Course website

All of the assignments will be posted to the course website at https://stat20.org. This also holds the course notes, the syllabus, and links to Gradescope, Ed, and RStudio.

Assignments, Exams, and Grading

You will be turning in your assignments on a platform called Gradescope. Generally, you will have:

Reading Questions due Wednesdays at 12pm and Thursdays at 12pm
Participation you can complete in class on Wednesday and Thursday
Problem Sets due Thursdays at 11:59pm
Labs due Mondays at 12pm or a Quiz taken on Monday.

Gradescope is the platform where your assignments will be graded, so you can return there to get feedback on your work. You are welcome to file a regrade request if you notice that we made an error in applying the rubric to your work. You will typically have a week after the release of grades to file a request.

More on the assignment types

Reading Questions

Reading questions serve to check your understanding and engagement while going through the lecture notes prior to class. They will be due at 12pm on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so before the lectures on those days. There will be a handful of questions per lecture note. These questions be a mix of multiple choice, short answer, and coding questions. You can find them directly on Gradescope.

Participation

On Wednesdays and Thursdays, we will be using the service PollEverywhere to record your participation. You will receive full credit as long as you participate in the poll questions on a given day.

Problem Sets

During class, we will give you a second engagement with the day’s material in the form of a worksheet. These worksheets will run like traditional homework problems and drill the concepts in the reading notes. The primary purpose of the problem sets are meant to help prepare you for the quizzes and the final exam. They are due as a PDF and will generally be due on Thursdays at 11:59pm, so that solutions can be released on Saturday.

These problem sets are graded on what we call earnest engagement. You will not be graded on accuracy, but you will be expected to show effort on the assignment. You can either receive full credit or no credit. The best way to achieve full credit is to explain your work wherever possible and attempt a fair number of the problems.

You may submit as a group of two or alone. To submit, please use the template that is given online. You can work on a tablet, or, print out the problem set, write in your answers and then scan your sheets and combine them into one pdf document!

Assessments

These are the primary assignments in the course. Depending on the topic at hand, you will have either a lab or a quiz which will be due/taken every Monday.

Labs

Labs are week-long assignments designed to apply the concepts from the lecture notes in the cause of doing an analysis of real data. This will involve both writing code and communicating your thoughts and findings in English. We’ll be working through some problems from the labs in class, but you may have to complete them on your own outside of class time. Some labs will be turned in individually; some will be turned in as groups.

Labs are individual assignments and are to be submitted as PDF files. These PDFs will be generated by rendering Quarto Documents (.qmd files) to HTML and then exporting the HTML into a PDF. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the Quarto Document as we will teach you about it!

Quizzes

Quizzes reinforce the most important concepts from the lecture notes and provide you the opportunity to work through misunderstandings of concepts with peers and the instructor. They also will prepare you for the final exam.

There is both an individual and group component to the quiz.

The individual component will last ~25 minutes. You are allowed one, A4, one-sided handwritten sheet of notes. The group component will take place immediately after the individual component has been completed and will last ~15 minutes. Groups must be of size 2-3. Your grade for a given quiz will be the average of your group and individual quiz scores. The group component is meant to and overwhelmingly does help students raise their grades; one way to take advantage of this component is to work with a group that you have worked and studied with in class.

The current quiz dates are Monday, June 24th, Monday, July 8th and Monday, July 15th.

Final Exam

The final exam is cumulative (covers all course topics). The time, date, and location is Wednesday, August 7 from 8-11am in Evans 10.

Grading

Your final grade in the course will be computed as follows:

Reading Questions: 5%
Participation: 5%
Problem Sets: 20%
Assessments: 49%
Getting Started Lab: 1%
EC Assessment: 1%
Final: 20%

Where applicable, within each group, all assignments are weighted equally.

The course grade calculator can be used to see your raw course grade. Make a copy of this calculator to modify it. Please refrain from asking staff questions about how bins will be determined. The historical distribution of letter grades shown for the class on Berkeleytime is usually a good reference for what the final grades will look like.

Policies

Accomodations for students with disabilities

Stat 20 is a course that is designed to allow all students to succeed. If you have letters of accommodations from the Disabled Students’ Program, please share them with your instructor as soon as possible, and we will work out the necessary arrangements.

Late Work

Unfortunately, with a class of this size, we are unable to keep track of and grade submissions of labs, reading questions, and problem sets that come in very late. If you narrowly miss the standard deadline, you will still be able to submit within an hour for a small penalty (5% reduction in score). If you don’t submit within an hour you can still submit for a larger penalty (30% reduction).

Drops

In order to provide more flexibility around emergencies that might arise for you throughout the semester (for example, missing a quiz due to COVID), we will apply for everyone:

one emergency drop for quizzes
one emergency drop for labs
two emergency drops for problem sets
two emergency drops for participation
two emergency drops for reading questions

This means, for example, that we will drop your lowest quiz score before computing your average score across all quizzes.

The calculator linked in an above section does not account for drops, so if you would like, you can readjust the cells in your own copy of the calculator to reflect your particular circumstance!

Collaboration policy

You are encouraged to collaborate with your fellow students on problem sets and labs, but the work you turn in should reflect your own understanding and all of your collaborators must be cited. The individual component of quizzes, reading questions, and exams must reflect only your work.

Researchers don’t use one another’s research without permission; scholars and students always use proper citations in papers; professors may not circulate or publish student papers without the writer’s permission; and students may not circulate or post non-public materials (quizzes, exams, rubrics-any private class materials) from their class without the written permission of the instructor.

The general rule: you must not submit assignments that reflect the work of others unless they are a cited collaborator.

The following examples of collaboration are allowed and in fact encouraged!

Discussing how to solve a problem with a classmate.
Showing your code to a classmate along with an error message or confusing output.
Posting snippets of your code to the discussion forum when seeking help.
Helping other students solve questions on the discussion with conceptual pointers or snippets of code that doesn’t whole hog give away the answer.
Googling the text of an error message.
Copying small snippets of code from answers on Stack Overflow.

The following examples are not allowed:

Leaving a representation of your assignment (the text, a screenshot) where students (current and future) can access it. Examples of this include websites like course hero, on a group text chain, over discord/slack, or in a file passed on to future students.
Accessing and submitting solutions to assignments from other students distributed as above. This includes copying written answers from other students and slightly modifying the language to differentiate it.
Googling for complete problem solutions.
Working on the reading questions or individual quizzes in collaboration with other people or resources. These assignments must reflect individual work.
Submitting work on an quiz or final that reflects consultation with outside resources or other people. These assessments must reflect individual work.

If you have questions about the boundaries of the policy, please ask. We’re always happy to clarify.

Violations of the collaboration policy

The integrity of our course depends on our ability to ensure that students do not violate the collaboration policy. We take this responsibility seriously and forward cases of academic misconduct to the Center for Student Conduct.

Students determined to have violated the academic misconduct policy by the Center for Student Conduct will receive a grade penalty in the course and a sanction from the university which is generally: (i) First violation: Non-Reportable Warning and educational intervention, (ii) Second violation: Suspension/Disciplinary Probation and educational interventions, (iii) Third violation: Dismissal.

And again, if you have questions about the boundaries of the collaboration policy, please ask!

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I do if I’m on the waitlist?

Attend both lecture and section (remember, we are teaching it as one two hour class), and submit all assignments on time. Visit your instructor on the first day of class so you can be added to the course Ed and Gradescope.
Are class sessions recorded?

No. Class sessions feature a mix of group problem solving, activities, and discussion and don’t lend themselves to recording. The course notes are the main reference source for the course. Any materials used during the class session will be posted to the course website.
Is attendance required?

No, but it is difficult to succeed in this course if you are not regularly attending class. Class sessions are designed to be an effective and efficient format to make progress on important assignments. Plus, it’s a great way to meet your fellow students and learn from one another.

If you can’t attend due to a religious observance, athletic competition, or something similarly important, don’t worry. Just reach out to us via a private Ed post, and we can let you know what to keep tabs on during the time you’re away.
Are time conflicts allowed?

Stat 20 does not allow students to enroll with time conflicts.

What if I join the class late?

If you join the class within the first two weeks, read the syllabus and lecture notes, take a look at Gradescope to get a sense of any assignments that may have already passed, and visit office hours to check that you’re up to date with things. The first two weeks of material are very important so you must be able to make up some assignments.

After two weeks into the semester, you’ll have too much material that you’ll need to make up, so you will have to wait to a subsequent semester to take Stat 20.

Don’t come to class if you’re sick!

Maintaining your health and that of the Berkeley community is of primary importance to course staff, so if you are feeling ill or have been exposed to illness, whether it’s COVID-19 or something else, please do not come to class. All of the materials used in class will be posted to the course website. You’re encouraged to reach out to fellow students to discuss the class materials or stop by group tutoring or office hours to chat with a tutor or the instructor.

Campus Resources

If you ever need someone to talk to about anything that you’re going through, please feel to reach out to the instructors. For some topics, the tutors might be an even better resource because they are students just like you. Tutors can also tell you what being an Academic Student Employee (ASE) is like.

With regards to reports of sexual misconduct/violence/assault, you may speak with us as well, but know that we will need to report our discussion to the Title IX officer. This is detailed below.

As UC employees, the instructors (and tutors) are “Responsible Employees” and are therefore required to report incidents of sexual violence, sexual harassment, or other conduct prohibited by University policy to the Title IX officer. We cannot keep reports of sexual harassment or sexual violence confidential, but the Title IX officer will consider requests for confidentiality. Note that there are confidential resources available to you through UCB’s PATH to Care Center, which serves survivors of sexual violence and sexual harassment; call their 24/7 Care Line at 510-643-2005.

Below are some campus resources that may be helpful for you: