Nutrition 209/309: Exemptions

Should you seek an exemption from Nutrition 209 and/or 309?

The Nutrition 209/309 sequence is a one-year (two 13 week semesters) course with a weekly 3 hour lecture and a few structured computing lab. Nutrition 209/309 is a first course. It is an initial exposure to statistics. It has considerable overlap with other introductory statistics courses. On the other hand, the sequence is also a final course. The faculty expects those who complete the courses to be able to perform many of their own analyzes.

Begin by reviewing the course description. Exemption from Nutrition 209 or 309 is by examination, which will be waived for those with a quantitative graduate degree. There are three situations where the answer to "Should you seek an exemption from Nutrition 209 and/or 309?" is clear.

If you can waive the exam, you should seek an exemption!
If you have never done any statistical computing, you will not be given an exemption from Nutrition 209!
If you have had only one semester of statistics, do not attempt to exempt yourself from Nutrition 309!

The other cases--whether someone who has already taken one or two semesters of statistics elsewhere, including some statistical computing, should try to exempt from Nutrition 209 and whether someone who has already taken two semesters of statistics elsewhere should try to exempt from Nutrition 309--are harder to address. That's because there are two ways to approach the question.

The half-full approach to awarding exemptions asks whether a student will benefit significantly from taking the course. The answer is invariably yes for those who cannot waive the exam, especially if they have taken only a one semester course. While a one semester course will have touched on many of the topics covered in Nutrition 209/309, it can't pursue them to the same depth. In Nutrition 209/309, students are not only taught basic statistical techniques, but they are also taught how to implement them by using the statistical program package SAS. They leave Nutrition 309 as fully functioning data analysts. It is not uncommon for students who take summer jobs or internships after taking Nut309 to find themselves analyzing data. Because there are too few statisticians to analyze all of the data that need to be studied, students who have taken Nutrition 209/309 often find themselves the most capable data analysts on their team. This is a scary prospect in light of their limited training, but it is nonetheless true. Those who have had some exposure to statistics prior to Nutrition 209 will have the opportunity to see the material again but from a different viewpoint and will have the chance to cement the knowledge they've already acquired.

The half-empty approach takes a cynical view of the meaning of an exemption. It asks whether a student determined to avoid the course could get a passing grade with minimal effort, perhaps by only sitting for the exams. Until this year, I would have written that because the class includes people whose quantitative abilities vary widely, it is likely that a student with enough confidence to take an exemption exam is capable, if forced to take the course, of obtaining passing grade with little effort. While it is nothing to aspire to, a strong student who had taken a solid one-semester statistics course could probably have done as well by doing little as the weakest student who takes the class, works hard, and receives the lowest passing grade. However, the quantitative skills of the class are greater now that my section of the course focuses on the needs of epidemiology and science students. This makes it much harder for someone who cannot waive the exam to get a cheap passing grade.

So, that's why this question frustrates me. It would be nice to have a clear cut answer. Many undergraduate programs require a statistics course, so many incoming students have already taken one. However, there's so much to cover and so little time to cover it that two courses are rarely, if ever, equivalent. These courses all spend their time wisely on important topics, but rarely the same topics. Since they are all introductory courses, there is considerable overlap. Because different instructors have different approaches and viewpoints, it's rarely possible to reconcile two courses by having students from one course attend one or two lectures in the other course.

It's clear what to do with those who know everything and those who know nothing. It's those in between who pose a problem. When I give an exemption exam, I try my best to estimate where the student is on the continuum and let the student and advisor decide for themselves. There are three possible outcomes:

The student should be given an exemption,
the student should take the course, or
the student should be given a conditional exeption, that is, be exempted on the condition that s/he reads up on certain topics or attends certain lectures.

You should consider seeking an exemption from Nutrition 209 if you are comfortable with confidence intervals and P values and, if given a dataset, you could

recognize whether the research question accompanying the data could be answered in part by a t test, chi-square test, or simple linear regression,
with the help of a manual, write out the appropriate SAS or SPSS command language and have the program perform the analyses, and
write out your findings in a few short sentences of simple English.

The guidelines for seeking an exemption from Nutrition 309 are similar to those for Nutrition 209. The list of techniques is expanded to include multiple regression, multi-factor analysis of variance (including repeated measures), multiple comparison procedures, and logistic regression.

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