Professor: Kelly McConville
Course Assistant: Grayson White
Office Hours: Check out the office hours schedule!
Course websites:
/home/courses/math241s21.In this course, you will hone your ability to tell a compelling and accurate story with data. By the end of the course, you will be better able to accomplish the following tasks:
Math 241 is an applied statistics course with a heavy emphasis on building data acumen, creating data visualizations, and telling data stories. In contrast, Math 141 is an introductory course that focuses deeply on statistical inference (i.e., hypothesis testing and confidence intervals) and Math 243 largely focuses on statistical modeling. Therefore, while inference and modeling are important tools when extracting knowledge from data, they are not the focus of Math 241. Of course, you are likely to use concepts and tools from Math 141 in your projects.
All of the required readings will come from free, online resources and will be linked to in the Schedule. The resources we will use repeatedly include:
It is very important to stay on-top of the material since we will move at a fairly brisk pace. If you feel yourself falling behind, please seek out help.
Your grade will be based on your performance on the following key components of the course:
If you are a student with a documented disability in need of accommodations, I encourage you to reach out to Reed’s Disability Services Office, or its director, Theresa Lowrie, to make the necessary arrangements. If you already have accommodations, in place, please submit your accommodations to me through the DSS portal, and then come to discuss your accommodation needs with me in person during office hours or by appointment.
I encourage you to collaborate on assignments but every piece of work you do must be your own. Copying and pasting other people’s work or code is not acceptable. The Honor Principle must guide your conduct in this class. The following section from the Guidebook to Reed College summarizes the expectations for this class:
Reed College is a community of scholars. The fundamental ethical principle governing scholarship is that one should never claim or represent as one’s own work that which is not one’s own. Proper academic conduct requires that all work submitted for academic purposes – including, but not limited to examinations, laboratory reports, essays, term papers, homework exercises, translations, and creative work—be entirely the work of the person or persons who submit it, and that, in the case of work based upon experiment and observation, the experimental results and observations be reported faithfully. The principle thus requires that no one claim authorship to the work of another and that no one falsify or misrepresent empirical data. This principle should be clear to every scholar, although determining its application in particular circumstances may require careful thought and guidance.