Thoughts on Biostats Midterm
For the biostats exam, I think you should really be familiar with the conceptual side of things. This was something that most people didn't really expect since they thought it would be mostly just plugging in numbers to calculate the standard deviation and doing hypothesis test questions like in the textbook (There will be good chunk of questions like that but... what I mean by conceptual stuff is like knowing the conditions very well of when to use what test. For many questions, you won't have to solve the problem from beginning to end. You'll have some data given to you and the mean calculated or something like that, and you'll need to finish off the rest.
There were some questions on labs too so make sure you know what you did during lab i.e. know generally what you did on SPSS i.e. certain commands like "split file" and the certain hypotheses you investigated. Calculation questions weren't too bad. You should be alright for this part if you've done the homework. They pull questions off the assigned homework. It won't be exactly the same but I found them pretty close. Some of them, the numbers were just changed. There were many questions with options like "this cannot be calculated from the data" so make sure to be very clear on the definitions, exceptions and when you can and can't use certain formulas.
A substantial proportion of people found the midterm very difficult. I think there were only a couple people who got over 90 but there was a huge chunk of people in the mid 70 to 80 range. I personally didn't find this exam too bad but I've learned many of these concepts before i.e. in high school data management and first year statistics. If you took first year statistics, I would say that more than 50% of the material in the course is similar to a first year stats course.
There were some questions on labs too so make sure you know what you did during lab i.e. know generally what you did on SPSS i.e. certain commands like "split file" and the certain hypotheses you investigated. Calculation questions weren't too bad. You should be alright for this part if you've done the homework. They pull questions off the assigned homework. It won't be exactly the same but I found them pretty close. Some of them, the numbers were just changed. There were many questions with options like "this cannot be calculated from the data" so make sure to be very clear on the definitions, exceptions and when you can and can't use certain formulas.
A substantial proportion of people found the midterm very difficult. I think there were only a couple people who got over 90 but there was a huge chunk of people in the mid 70 to 80 range. I personally didn't find this exam too bad but I've learned many of these concepts before i.e. in high school data management and first year statistics. If you took first year statistics, I would say that more than 50% of the material in the course is similar to a first year stats course.