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| MEMO FROM: M. Millman TO: Math Faculty DATE: 3/20/97 RE: "Reform" of Statistics I I am writing to draw your attention to the recent overhaul of Math 120 [Statistics I]. If you examine the new course outline, you will observe that it includes all the material of the original Math 120 as well as all the material of Math 121 [Statistics II]. The course material has been doubled but the number of class hours per week has remained the same. (One additional hour is to be devoted to "competency" in statistical software). I find some serious flaws in this scheme and I suspect you will too: 1. How can we teach six hours of material in three hours? The author of the course outline suggests things like spending a total of TWO hours on the subject of Probability, which comprises an entire chapter of the textbook and takes me a minimum of eight hours to cover adequately. Can we really water things down to this extent? Does the author live on planet Earth? 2. The author devotes one hour to each of two SPSS [statistical software] projects. Does he realize that it requires a minimum of seven or eight hours just to teach students how to operate this program (i.e., enter data, load files, navigate menus, print and interpret output, etc.), let alone expect them to complete two projects? 3. Was this disaster ever approved by the curriculum committee? 4. What is now the content or purpose of Statistics II? 5. 13 of the 16 sections of Statistics I are currently being taught by adjuncts whose knowledge of the material in Statistics II is questionable. Do you believe the couple of hours of "training" we gave them will enable them to conduct the labs? 6. At the very least, don't we owe our students courses that make sense and that they have some chance of completing successfully? The degree of incompetence evinced here truly boggles the mind. 7. Is the purpose of this "reform" merely a vehicle to aid a favored crony in obtaining tenure? |
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