Straightliner or ALEk, please help

[vickyvicky]

I want to take Stat, but I don't know which one would be a good choice?

Any experience you would like to share would be greatly appreciated

[Potatoloco]

I'm about to enroll in Stats for straighterline. I have no idea what the comparison would be between everything. But my one frame of reference I have is accounting took about 8 days total from start to finish, including getting through the midterm within a 24 hour period of starting. I imagine with stats being made up of entirely quizzes and 1 final, you could finish up pretty quick.

[NAP]

Excelsior students in the school of Liberal Arts can take ALEKS Stats for upper-level credit.

[ryoder]

Aleks stats is not easy. It is totally doable but is not easy by any means.
Here is how I did it. I have a LOT of math in my past, 4 college calculus classes and I am a computer programmer.

I logged in and took the initial stats assessment. If you pass this with a 70% you will be done, end of story. You won't however. You will pass some of the basic math stuff and the prob and stat questions will stump you and you will end up after the assessment with a portion of the stats pie filled in. Its a pie chart that you can click on to navigate to more difficult sections of the course.

Say you click on descriptive statistics. They will ask you a question like, calculate the std deviation of the following numbers. You do it, if you answer this type of question right 3 times in a row, they add it to your pie. You continue working pie pieces until a certain point where they give you an assessment again. Now is your chance to do better than last time.

If you are smart and read this forum, you realized that you should print every detailed answer to a pdf or some sort of electronic file and save them in a stats folder on your hard drive. You'll see how this works. When you answer wrong in the non-assessment part you will be given the detailed explanation of how to work the problem and the answer. Click the print buttoo, choose Adobe PDF or Microsoft XPS document writer. If you don't have these options you could just print to paper if you want but I recommend XPS or PDF. Save all the examples in the folder. When you do an assessment you can search the folder for the exact type of question and redo the work.

Stats took me 8 days to complete. Two weekend days, part time during the week and one more weekend day to finish up. It kicked my but. I had a lot of notes that I just recently threw away.

Straighterline is great for accounting and business communication. I have no experience with stats but definitely use them for those two classes.

PM me for my stats notes if you want. I'll zip them and send out.

[Rhashad]

Aleks is probably the most time consuming way togo, unless you know the material. If you have a good grasp of stats, go with Aleks, as the previous poster said, reaching 70 during your initial assessment is all you need.

If you don't know stats, go with straighterline, imo.

[NAP]

Another idea:

A few people on the forum have started studying with ALEKS Stats and then taken the DSST Stats exam.

[ryoder]

DSSTs look better on your transcript than ALEKS or Straighterline. Some colleges only accept RA, CLEP and DSST, not ACE.

If you can pass the DSST go for it. I have trouble getting into the testing center so anything I can do at home is a bonus and stats wasn't very easy so I thought I'd do it through ALEKs.
I did the same for finance and accounting, took straighterline when I could have tested out.

[burbuja0512]

Another idea:

A few people on the forum have started studying with ALEKS Stats and then taken the DSST Stats exam.

This is exactly what I did for college math. It worked wonderfully. Started off with ALEKS College Algebra, after brushing up in ALEKS, added IC. If I had studied more, I would have probably gotten a better score on my CLEP, but I really hated math and was just trying to get a pass, which I did.. barely lol

I think that would be the most efficient way of doing things, time-wise, if you couldn't get to the 70% mark in ALEKS quickly.