I’ve rarely heard undergrads mention STATS 10, an introduction to statistical reasoning, without adding a dramatic groan, urging me to commiserate over their epic suffering. They dread it.
This is not to say the statistics professors do a shoddy job. Their average bruinwalk.com rating is 6.6 out of 10, which is not too shabby. The average political science professor gets a 6.3.
No, the course gets such reactions because students often loathe math, and this course forces it upon them.
I have no sympathy. The Faculty Executive Committee, which oversees the UCLA College curriculum and has been toying with the idea of reforming the quantitative reasoning requirement, should make undergraduates do more statistics and math. Now.
If it doesn’t, students risk missing out on half of what you’re supposed to learn in college: how to reason creatively and in different ways.
“It’s chic almost to say, “˜I was never good at math,'” said Andrea Brose, an administrator who has taught math here for 9 years.
What is chic is reflected in social science and humanities majors. Of the popular ones, only sociology, international development studies, political science and economics require a statistics course. Anthropology, English, philosophy, and Chicana and Chicano or Afro-American studies require none at all.
Let me show, using the sexy subject of linear regression analysis, why this is a shame.
Suppose these students are pondering whether the American judicial system is “racist,” a hot topic lately thanks to the district attorney of Jena, La.
Do blacks serve more time for the same crime?
If I told them the justice system isn’t racist, it’s classist, they couldn’t just point to the “Jena Six” to rebut. They’d need convincing evidence about the whole justice system to prove me wrong, and they couldn’t do that without serious statistics.
To rebut properly, they would randomly sample prisoners and collect data on their race and other determinants of their prison sentence and have a computer estimate something like the following model:
prison sentence =
ß0 + ß1(black) +
ß2(violence of crime) +
ß3(income) + μ
The ß’s ““ called “betas” by fraternity brothers, Greek people and statisticians ““ represent the increment of your prison sentence if you have the characteristics in parentheses.
If the ß in front of “black” comes out large and positive, that means if you’re black, your sentence goes way up.
If the income ß is large and negative, it means as your income goes up, on average, your sentence goes down: an inverse relationship. If the black ß is zero, there’s no evidence of racism.
This model is of course simplistic ““ it fits in a column ““ but ones like it help you order your thinking about an issue.
If you’re reading a novel about the struggle of a youth in the judicial system, just visualizing the model would cause you to wonder if the author was right to focus on race and not income as the factor that landed the youth in prison. You’d line up all the possible variables and wonder about their ß’s.
The FEC should require that all students take a course in statistics more rigorous than just Statistics 10.
“No one has ever been happy with the requirement as it exists,” said Robert Fovell, professor of atmospheric and ocean sciences and chair of the committee, about the current quantitative reasoning requirement.
It’s too easy. In 2005, 86 percent of incoming freshmen satisfied it even before starting school.
The requirement could be modeled on the inescapable Writing II requirement, which comes on top of Writing I, a requirement that can be satisfied in high school.
“We teach a lot of tools,” Fovell said of high school education, “but we rely on the students themselves to put them to use on something other than the homework problem at hand.”
The new requirement, which could be called “Statistical and Quantitative Reasoning II,” would teach the tools of statistics and help students apply them to their own interests, whatever they may be.
“Nobody would walk with pride saying, “˜I don’t know how to read,'” Brose said. Unfortunately, however, that isn’t the case with math.
The College should fix that. Nothing would be more reasonable.
E-mail Reed at treed@media.ucla.edu.
General comments can be sent to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.