Most JCs by now should be embarking on their Statistics Journey. I know a school that is finishing up really fast, and I think they will easily finish the syllabus by May. So I notice many students are thrown off the track with Statistics. It is slightly out of their comfort zone, especially Permutation and Combinations. The topic itself is really sneaky. Here’s are some advices for Statistics.
1. Read every question carefully. Words like, “at least”, “not more than”, “if” and “given”.
2. Many students seem to struggle with the idea of conditional probability and that should not the case. Students should learn what it means and how it works, instead of it being simply 
. Understand how this came about will really save your 6-9 marks probability question.
3. Learn to break the question down to something you’re familiar with. As what we review in class, write probabilities in a format that you understand easily. Probability is often counter-intuitive, stick to the formulas.
4. Yes, the whole statistics is one big topic by itself. What you learnt in Permutation & Combination is used in probability (e.g. A’levels 2013 P2 Q11), and probability is used in all the distributions you will be learning, lastly normal distributions is used in hypothesis testing too.
5. Statistics is rather qualitative, so students should show understanding in what they learn. Topics such as sampling requires you to think rationally and consider what limitations we face. A clear understanding of your contents and definitions will go a long way.
