Welcome to STAT 500!

About this Course

Welcome to the course notes for STAT 500: Applied Statistics. These notes are designed and developed by Penn State's Department of Statistics and offered as open educational resources. These notes are free to use under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0.

This course is part of the Online Master of Applied Statistics program offered by Penn State's World Campus.

Currently enrolled?

If you are a current student in this course, please see Canvas for your syllabus, assignments, lesson videos and communication from your instructor.

How to enroll?

If you would like to enroll and experience the entire course for credit please see 'How to enroll in a course' on the World Campus website.

Course Overview Section

This course provides an introduction to the basic concepts of probability, common distributions, statistical methods, and data analysis. It is intended for graduate students who have one undergraduate statistics course and who wish to review the fundamentals before taking additional 500 level statistics courses. This course is cohort-based, which means that there is an established start and end date, and that you will interact with other students throughout the course.

Course Goals

Upon successful completion of this course, you should be able to:

  • Appreciate and understand the role of statistics in your field
  • Develop an ability to apply appropriate statistical methods to summarize and analyze data for some of the more routine experimental settings.
  • Make sense of data and be able to report the results in appropriate tables or statistical terms for inclusion in your thesis or paper.
  • Interpret results from various computer packages (Minitab, SPSS, SAS) and be able to use Minitab to perform appropriate statistical techniques.