BUS204: Business Statistics

This course will introduce you to business statistics, or the application of statistics in the workplace. Statistics is a course in the methods for gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data. If you have taken a statistics course in the past, you may find some of the topics in this course familiar. You can apply statistics to any number of fields – from anthropology to hedge fund management – because many of us best interpret data when it is presented in an organized fashion (as it is with statistics). You can analyze data in any number of forms. Summary statistics, for example, provide an overview of a data set, such as the average score on an exam. However, the average does not always tell the entire story; for example, if the average score is 80, it may be because half of the students received 100s and the other half received 60s. This would present a much different story than if everyone in the class had received an 80, which demonstrates consistency. Statistics provides more than simple averages. In this course, you will learn how to apply statistical tools to analyze data, draw conclusions, and make predictions of the future. The course will begin with data distributions, followed by probability analysis, sampling, hypothesis testing, inferential statistics, and, finally, regression. This course is mathematically intensive, and much of what you learn here will deal with things you encounter every day. This course also makes use of spreadsheets, an important tool for working with and making sense of numerical data.