It wasn’t a great week for me on KA. 👎🏼 I began my week a third of the way through the AP College Statistics Course Challenge and finished it all off on Tuesday. I was happy that I got through it early in the week, except I got 13 questions wrong (😳) which meant I then had seven unit tests that I needed redo… I got through three of the unit tests pretty quickly as they were all super easy and only took me around 15 minutes each to get through. Unfortunately, the fourth unit test from Unit 8, Random Variables and Probability Distributions, was much more difficult. I had a very busy Friday and Saturday which was when I started this unit test, so I didn’t have much time to put towards trying to get through it, but on the few attempts I had at it, I only made it through two or three questions before getting one wrong. So, all in all, I feel like it was a pretty lousy week for me, BUT the silver lining is that I don’t think it’s going to take me the five to ten weeks I thought it was going to take me to get through this course, so I’ve got that going for me which is nice. 🙂

The first unit test I worked through was from Unit 2, Exploring One-Variable Quantitative Data: Displaying and Describing. It was only ten questions long and all the questions just asked me to look at different kinds of bar charts/formats of presenting data, read them, and then answer fill-in-the-blank questions about the data. I remembered how each type chart worked so, even though it was easy, I was relieved that I at least remembered some of what I worked through in this course (which I’m pretty sure was about five years ago…). I didn’t take any screen shots of the questions from this unit test since they were all so simple.

The next unit test I worked through was from the fourth unit, Exploring One-Variable Quantitative Data: Percentiles, Z-Scores, and the Normal Distribution. There were a few tricky questions on this test but overall it wasn’t too difficult . Here’s a question from the test:

Question 1

I thought this question was pretty easy but figured I’d add it to this post just for funsies. I’ll admit that I did have to go back and do a quick review of how z-scores and z-tables work but once I did a quick refresh, it was easy. I just needed to figure out how many standard deviations away 18 was from the mean (20.6 – 18 = 2.6; 2.6 / 2 = 1.3 = σ), and then find the difference in the z-scores between z = –1.3 and z = 0.

I got through that unit test pretty quickly on Wednesday and then got started on the unit test for Unit 5, Exploring Two-Variable Quantitative Data. This test was also pretty easy and mostly just had me solving logarithm questions. Here are two questions from the test:

Question 2

It took me a second to remember that I needed to take 10 to the power of both sides of the equation in order to isolate the temperature. (I’m not sure if that’s the correct way to say that.) After that, it was just some simple arithmetic to solve what the temperature would after 15 minutes.

Question 3

I got this question wrong not knowing/remembering what I needed to do. I watched the recommended video that was given at the end of KA’s answer which helped me understand how to use the formula, but I don’t remember what is going on with this type of question or why the math works the way it does. That said, it doesn’t seem like it would take long to figure out, I’d just need to spend a bit more time reviewing it. (Which I probably should… 😬)

I got through that unit test on Thursday and started the unit test for Unit 8, Random Variables and Probability Distributions, on Friday. This was the unit test I got smoked on. 😒 Here are two questions from the test:

Question 4

Compared to all the other questions I attempts on this test, this one was very easy. I was able to think through/visualize/remember that the mean and standard deviation would simply scale by 10 with 10 attempts. Honestly, this was like most of the other questions I worked through this week in that it was so easy it didn’t really seem like it was worth adding, but by this point it was Sunday and I didn’t have enough things to talk about in this blog post so I decided to add it just to fill out this post. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Question 5

I got this question wrong. The hand written notes you see above were copied from KA’s answer. 😔 That said, I was able to figure out what the mean of the cars would be thinking that 8/100 = 1/x and therefore that x = 100/8 = 12.5. But, after that I had no clue how to solve the standard deviation. When I looked at KA’s answer, I didn’t/don’t understand the formula they used for the SD. They gave me a recommended video to watch (which they don’t always do in their answer, so I was happy about that), so my plan is to start this coming week watching that vid to hopefully wrap my head around the SD formula for this question.

And that was basically it for this week. 🫤 Overall, a pretty lacklustre week… As I said, I got 13 questions wrong on the Course Challenge and, for the most part, the questions I got wrong were MUCH harder than the questions that came up in the first few unit tests this week, so I’m guessing that the four remaining unit tests I need to redo will all be much harder. But even still, I’m hoping I can get through them all in two weeks, and then I’m praying that I’ll be able to get ≥27 questions correct on my next attempt at the Course Challenge, after that. If it works out that way, I could potentially be done with this course in three weeks. I’ll need to put in a much better effort over the next few weeks than I did this week if I’m going to make that timeline happen so, as always, fingers crossed that I have a productive upcoming week so that I can finish this all off before I turn 95 years old. 🤞🏼