My statistics midterm was this morning. It was longer than I expected -- I was writing up until he called time.
My professor's emphasis is on writing about statistics. He walks us through the math, but the exam didn't ask any questions like, "Explain the relationship between standard deviation and standard error." It was mostly practical: you have this body of data. Do these results conform to the expected distribution? Is there a relationship between variable A and variable B? Write up your findings in APA format. Ten questions like that, in eighty minutes. (Eighty-five, really; he let us stay a little over.)
When I took stats for my master's degree, in 1994, we were still doing pencil and paper calculations. Now it's almost all SPSS. I don't quite trust SPSS (or maybe I don't quite trust myself to get the right numbers out of SPSS), but I didn't have the time to check the output beyond a quick once-over, just to make sure there weren't any glaring errors.
In 1994 I was turning in hand-written exams; today he had us open a Word file and pop in a header at the top with our names on it. Our computers all have internet access, and we could use anything we wanted to on the computer as long as it wasn't connected to a live person at the other end. (Google: okay. Google Talk: not okay.)
Fingers crossed -- we'll see how it turns out.
Pete wants to go outside and chase squirrels. He is clicking his tongue at me in an irresistible imitation of a squirrel. Enough blogging, he says. All right then, Pete.
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