This is a detailed statistics course. It includes an OA and two performance objectives. I started off by taking the pre-assessment cold. I passed but needed to improve. There were several cohorts available with this course including some “express” ones. I ended up watching all of them over the course of a few days. The cohorts get interrupted by inline quizzes and I found sometimes it wouldn’t render correctly on my browser. I just get a blank screen and have to hit the play button a few times to get the quiz to pop up.
In any case, the cohorts were helpful. Each cohort covers a module or two and includes a Google quiz at the end. Those were helpful, too. I ended up not even opening the reading material at all. After completing the cohorts and quizzes, I took the OA and passed. I had one approaching competence but I think that was because my brain was fried from all the studying. In any case, it was offset by the three exemplary sections. Although I recognized similarly worded questions, I found the OA a complete departure from the PA. There were several questions where I made educated guesses. Overall, I’d have to say I found this test to be more difficult than the one for Financial Management (which is allegedly the hardest test in the MBA program).
With the OA out of the way, I next went to the performance stuff, which I actually found fun (and relatively easy). The first task required a real-world business situation that a statistical analysis could be applied to. After figuring that out and coming up with an appropriate analysis technique, the rest was pretty easy. It consisted of filling out a template that asked some questions regarding the procedure. I submitted that but, a few hours later, it was returned for revision because I forgot to include a signed waiver stipulating I wasn’t using any confidential material from a business or employer. Resubmitted with the waiver and passed within a few hours.
After task 1 was passed, I moved on to task 2 which was basically performing the statistical analysis and writing a short paper on it. I actually enjoyed this because Excel has the data analysis kit to perform various analyses. It was kinda of cool to manipulate the data to see how that changed the t-stats and p-values. I groaned when I saw the rubric suggestion of the paper being 2-4 pages (I don’t like writing) but this went pretty quick and it was fairly simple to parse the analysis results into the paper (while also including some images from Excel, which take up a lot of whitespace). In the end, my paper was about 5 pages long.