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Re: Whats college level accounting statistics like? - September 16th 2011, 07:09 AM

I've never done accounting at a college/university level, only at a high-school level but I have done several courses in statistics.

There's no heavy math calculations you do in your introductory courses. In later courses (i.e. some 2nd years ones but definitely 3rd year ones), you get very math oriented depending what area you're studying in. However, introductory courses generally assumes normal/bell curves and base their theories from there, such as z-tests. This always makes it simpler but some people find it harder to grasp the concepts than others. You won't need to know how to do derivations as they do involve higher level math, so if you know at least some multi-variable calculus and linear algebra, you may be able to handle the derivations. One of the difficulties though is since you aren't told in introductory courses how some of the theories come, it forces you to just memorize.

There's not a high level of math at all, it's mostly memorizing equations (or you may be given them depending how nice your prof is). You don't need to derive any of them, just plug in your numbers and go from there. Sometimes you'll need to use multiple equations one after the other because they each are meant to be used for particular situations, so there's little confusion. At an introductory level, you'd do lots of it by hand since the calculations are pretty short. The longest would probably be doing an ANOVA table (analysis of variance). Eventually, you'd probably use computer software to produce various graphs and do the calculations because once you've done 20 ANOVAs by hand, you've pretty much got the gist of it for the introductory level.

I found the computer software to sometimes be confusing and quite complicated as they're not meant just for an introductory level. Many are used in real-world situations for higher-level statistics, so you'll probably see many terms on it you've never heard of. For example, a common computer statistical software, and one that I use, is SPSS and MiniTab16 (you can get a free trial of MiniTab16 online).


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