Catching up on Stat 2.2x

As I wrote in an earlier post, I regret not having taken Stat2.2x from the start. I have since registered, and it's sort of an uphill battle to get back up to speed. I've viewed the videos up to about the halfpoint of week 2 now, and tried my hand at the problem sets (ungraded of course since the deadline is way past.) I didn't do too badly, but not nearly good enough to pass the overall course.

Let's do the calculations:

• there are five exercise sets, the lowest score of which is dropped, worth 25% of the grade together (meaning the 25% are split into 4 ES scores). So each ES is worth 6.25% of the overall grade. Three exercise sets are still available to me, so I can get up to 18.75%;
• last week's midterm was also worth 25% − but that's closed to me now;
• the final is worth 50% of the grade.

One needs 50% overall to pass the course. A total of 68.75% is still reachable; so a pass is far from impossible. However probabilities is something I never really developped a good intuition for; this takes time. Rushing through the course (doing in three weeks what's meant to be done in five) may not be the best way to do it.
And of course, it means I have to catch up to week 3 today since the corresponding exercise set is due at 1am tonight, Paris time.
But eh, it's a challenge, right?

About the course, then: Stat2.2x follows Stat2.1x, and everything is kind of the same: the lectures are very long and slow, Prof. Adhikari speaks very slowly (with a lovely accent though) and repeats herself quite a lot. That's deliberate: probabilities is one area in which one really should get an intuition for how to approach problems, and going through the material slowly and deliberately is a good way to build that intuition. Still, when you've understood something, it kind of grates to have it repeated three times over fifteen minutes.
The course logistics are a bit different from other MOOCs: all the lectures are released at once, but the exercise sets are released only at the start of the week under scrutiny. The midterm and final have a rather harsh timeframe, as there are only two days between release and due date, and they're on weekends. Since the final alone is worth half of the overall grade, one may have to choose between passing the course and that romantic getaway to Florence one had planned for months before.
In practice, it means one can quickly watch the whole course's material, then review the relevant material just before the exercise sets / midterm / final when they're released. That means going over the material twice, which helps integrating the knowledge, I find.
With a more forgiving schedule for the exams, it would be a perfect arrangement. But then again, left to my own devices, I'd do away with midterms and finals altogether − but that's a topic for another blog post.

Anyway, I'd better stop procrastinating, and learn stuff about hypergeometric probability distributions.

[EDIT: Yay! Made the 6.25% in time.]