ENGG2780 Course Review
Term Taken: 2024 Spring
Instructor: Dr. Sinno Jialin Pan
Grading Scheme
- Attendance: 15%
- Quiz: 15%
- Midterm: 30%
- Final exam: 40%
Textbook
- Dimitri P. Bertsekas and John N. Tsitsiklis, “Introduction to Probability”, Athena Scientific, 2nd Edition, 2008
- Morris H. DeGroot, Mark J. Schervish, “Probability and Statistics”, Pearson Education, 4th edition, 2012
Review
Well, what I want to say here is quite similar to the course review I wrote for ENGG2760. This is also a 2-credit course, which introduces another important math concept—statistics.
The course contents themselves are not that difficult to understand; it’s just a very classical, standard statistics course—Bayesian statistics, classical statistics, etc. The grading isn’t bad either. For example, 30% comes from quizzes, which take place during tutorial classes. So all you need to do is attend all the quizzes, and you already have 15% secured. The quizzes are quite different from the exercises given, but the content is still easy. Only your best five scores are counted, so if you get full marks on the first five quizzes, you can simply attend the last two, leave them blank, and hand them in—you’ll still get the full 30%! That’s easy, isn’t it?
The midterm is also quite simple, especially since it mostly covers the Bayesian part, so there’s not much to worry about. The same goes for the final. Although it covers more material, it’s still not as difficult as you might think.
As for the instructor, I don’t really have much to comment on. He is quite strict—like a very traditional teacher. He will suddenly stop talking and ask students to be quiet. What he does isn’t wrong, but the sudden pauses make the lectures feel a bit inconsistent.
Resource
Again, I have adapted the content from the lecture notes and some online resources and made a note for this course. I’m not sure if everything is clear and correct, as I’m not qualified or intending to create notes for others to use. But just for recapping the content, I think writing notes this way is quite helpful. You can refer to my notes here.