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Three Reasons to Take AP Statistics

Useful subject matter

Excellent curriculum (one of the better AP tests)

Teacher with professional applied stats background

Statistics has Many Uses

financial markets (my mortgage industry experience)

insurance

credit cards

quality control

sports--Moneyball

medicine

social sciences

journalism

symbiotic relationship to the computer age

computer intelligence--spam filters, MP3's, speech recognition, search

Curriculum teaches Technical Communication

The math is fairly simple. Computers and calculators do much of the work.

Typical problem is a word problem. Interpret the problem, choose the appropriate statistical technique, interpret the results.

Four general topics: data description (Mickey Mouse); experimental design (terminology and common sense); probability (mathematical logic); statistical inference (probability, procedures, and terminology)