Arnold Kling's AP Statistics Course

Useful Links

"If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you should find something where you provide a scarce, complementary service to something that is getting ubiquitous and cheap. So what's getting ubiquitous and cheap? Data. And what is complementary to data? Analysis. So my recommendation is to take lots of courses about how to manipulate and analyze data: databases, machine learning, econometrics, statistics, visualization, and so on."
--Hal Varian, chief economist, Google.

This used to be the main web page for my AP stats course. If you see anything on this web site that pertains to grading, assignments, or classroom policy, that information is out of date and no longer applicable to the course as I teach it currently (if I am still teaching it). The course covers probability, statistical inference, data description, and experimental design. The list of assignments is here.

Lecture Notes with Audio

  1. Why you should take AP Statistics
  2. Introduction to Probability
  3. Two Events and Conditional Probability
  4. Random Variables
  5. Mean, Variance, and Standard Deviation
  6. Transformations of Random Variables
  7. Working with the Normal Distribution
  8. Binomial Distribution
  9. Sampling Distributions
  10. Confidence Intervals
  11. Hypothesis Tests
  12. More on Hypothesis Tests
  13. t Tests
  14. C2 Tests (note: no audio)
  15. Linear Regression
  16. Topics in Regression
  17. review lecture (includes data description and experimental design)

project on Montgomery County schools.

"My observation is this: if a course has a critical mass of good-natured, smart, and vocal students, it works well, and my evaluations are the better for it."
--Harry Brighouse

Handouts

    Part I: Probability and Distribution Functions

    For a combined set of all lectures and practice problems pertaining to chapter 6, click here. For chapter 7 (an updated version of the lectures on random variables), click here.

  1. Introduction
  2. Sample Space
  3. Coins and Independence
  4. Failure Models
  5. Dice
  6. Probability Rules
  7. Logic and Probability
  8. Conditional Probability
  9. Bayes' Theorem
  10. Contingency Tables
  11. Random Variables
  12. Remarks on Random Variables
  13. The Expectation Operator
  14. Mean and Variance
  15. Convexity
  16. The Binomial Distribution
  17. The Geometric Distribution
  18. Review of random variables, mean, variance, binomial, and geometric
  19. The Uniform Distribution
  20. The Normal Distribution
  21. Working with the Normal Distribution

    Part II: Statistical Methods

  22. Sampling Distributions
  23. Chapter 9 Review and Cheat Sheet
  24. The Central Limit Theorem
  25. Confidence Intervals
  26. Hypothesis Testing
  27. Summary of Chapter 10
  28. Review of Chapter 10
  29. Introduction to t tests
  30. Degrees of Freedom
  31. A t-test cookbook
  32. A Chart for t-tests and z-tests
  33. Chi-square tests
  34. Regression
  35. Regression Output (Microsoft Excel)

    Part III: Simulation, Design, and Descriptive Statistics

  36. Simulation
  37. Experimental Design
  38. March Madness
  39. AP Study Outline

Review Questions

  1. Chapter 6
  2. Chapter 6 2005
  3. Chapters 7 and 8
  4. Chapter 2
  5. Chapter 9
  6. Cumulative review--chapter 6
  7. Cumulative review--chapters 7 and 8
  8. Cumulative review--chapters 2 and 9
  9. Chapter 10
  10. Cumulative review after chapter 10
  11. Chapters 11 and 12
  12. For mid-term (mostly hypothesis testing and t-tests)
  13. Review Questions for Data Description
  14. Review Questions for Experimental Design
  15. Review Questions for Probability
  16. Review Questions for Statistical Inference
  17. Review Questions for Regression

Discussion Section Problems

  1. St. Petersburg Paradox Problem

Some other useful web sites are Washington University stats and David M. Lane's hyperstat.