 I'm really scared about the math in this course, Amy, you are the teaching assistant. What can you tell me about what I have to do to pass this course? Hi Joe. Yes, I am the teaching assistant for BUS 233 this term. The professor asked me to make a few comments on what is expected of you in this course. Now, just stop with the I'm Bad at Math stuff. It is not the intent of this course for you to memorize formulas and derivations. The expectation is that you will learn to think statistically in a smart way. It is not the intent of this course for you to spend inordinate amounts of time manually crunching step by step formulas. The expectation is you will learn to use technology to think statistically in a smart way, simply stated. The goal for you in this course is to learn how to formulate questions. Questions that can be answered by collecting data and analyzing that data using technology, and then using technology to effectively communicate the results. Wow. No math? Whoa. Of course there is some math, and you will have to learn key statistical concepts, such as why standardizing numbers is useful and how to standardize them, and how we can make judgments about a larger group, or population, from what we learn by taking a sample, and to do that you will need to build a statistical vocabulary that will enable you to understand these concepts intuitively and to be able to interact with the technology. What technology should I use? Someone said I had to have a TI-84 calculator to pass the course. No, you do not have to use a TI calculator in order to pass this course, if you already know how to use the TI and own one, that could be the way to go. Many students get Bs and As using them. But I would not recommend buying a TI just for this course, especially if you are trying to learn how to use it for the first time. Many students find learning to use Excel to do the number crunching a better investment of their time. Having Excel skills will help in their future academic courses and careers. Using Excel makes it easy to build a notebook of typical problems and their solutions that can be reused on similar problems during exams and quizzes. If you already have basic Excel skills, you can easily pick up the Excel statistical functions in an eight-week term. But I do not know how to use Excel. If you don't have basic Excel skills but want to learn it, I would recommend going for a 15-week term course to give you time to learn both basic Excel and the statistics. A third option that works for folks who don't have experience with a TI or with Excel, but want to do an eight-week course, is stat crunch. Stat crunch is free with the lab website mystatlab we use for the course. It has a relatively flat learning curve compared to learning Excel or the TI from scratch. Many students use a combination of Excel and stat crunch. For some problems, stat crunch is just too intuitive and faster than Excel, unless you have already constructed an Excel model that can be reused by just changing a few data points. I hope this information helps you decide on the technology you will use to ease the time burden in this course. Thanks Amy. That eases my mind a bit. I am glad to know I have options. Remember. The expectation is that you will learn to think statistically and smart by using technology.