Am I ready for BEDA?

BEDA is designed with the assumption that you have some prior experience with statistics from your first year of study. Most of you will have completed a unit like ENVX1002 or DATA1001, which provide a solid foundation in statistics. However, the only formal prerequisite for BEDA is the completion of at least one first-year science unit (see Enrolment Rules for details). We strongly encourage those of you who have not completed a first-year statistics unit to consider doing so before enrolling in BEDA.

Important

If you still choose to enrol in BEDA without prior statistics experience, please be aware that you will need to invest extra time and effort to catch up. BEDA is not designed to teach statistics from the ground up as this has already been covered in your first-year units!

How to gauge your readiness

To help you figure out if you’re ready for BEDA, we have put together a few questions on the key ideas you should already be familiar with so that you may self-assess yourself. Before you start this unit, you should be able to answer the following:

• Explain what a p-value is: What does a p-value actually mean? If you got a p-value of 0.03 from a biology experiment, what would you conclude?
• Know your correlation: What’s the difference between positive and negative correlation? And why doesn’t correlation mean one thing causes another?
• Tell data types apart: Can you explain the difference between continuous, discrete, and categorical data? Could you give an example of each?
• Describe the ‘middle’ of your data i.e. central tendency: When would you use the mean instead of the median to talk about the centre of a dataset?
• Understand hypothesis testing: What are the main steps for testing a hypothesis? What do the null and alternative hypotheses do?
• Understand basic statistical tests: Can you remember what t-tests and simple linear regressions are for? Do you know what a ‘confidence interval’ or ‘standard error’ is telling you? It’s alright if you’re a bit rusty on these from first year, but could you get the gist with a quick recap?

As a general guide, if you can answer at least half of these questions, you should find the unit manageable.

The first few weeks of BEDA will briefly cover these concepts but we won’t be teaching them from scratch. If you’re not familiar with these topics we strongly suggest you review them before the unit starts, either by using online resources or by reading an introductory statistics textbook. We’ve recommended two that are available in the Library (and linked) below:

• Experimental Design and Data Analysis for Biologists by Quinn and Keough
• Biometry: the principles and practice of statistics in biological research by Sokal and Rohlf