Skip to content

Lecture notes. Written from the material of Berkeley Stat 243, licensed CC BY 4.0. These are notes, not a transcript: the material has been reorganised and rewritten. This adaptation carries the same licence, and the original is linked above.

11. Course Structure and Prerequisites

What this covers

This chapter is not a lecture on a computing technique. The material supplied for it is the course home page of Statistics 243, Introduction to Statistical Computing, as it appeared in three successive years (fall 2024, fall 2025, fall 2026). It answers a different question from the rest of the notes: not "how do you compute X" but "what is this course, how is it organised, and what does it assume of you before the first technical unit starts." It assumes nothing beyond an intention to take, or evaluate, the course.

What the course is

Statistics 243 is an introduction to statistical computing. In fall 2024 and fall 2025 it ran as a single semester-long course. By fall 2026 it had split into two half-semester courses, Stat 243A and Stat 243B, taught back to back under one shared course website; policies and logistics are described as pertaining to both, "with limited exceptions."

Course content — unit notes, labs, and problem sets — is distributed through the course website rather than through the home page itself, reached via the site's sidebar navigation.

Who can take it, and in what combination

Registration is gated by department: graduate Statistics students have first claim, and only once they have had the opportunity to register does the instructor consider undergraduates or students from other departments; concurrent-enrollment students (for example, exchange students from other institutions) are considered on the same "once Berkeley students have had their chance" basis. Anyone auditing, or otherwise not enrolled through the normal path, is asked to identify themselves through a survey early in the term.

Once the course became a 243A/243B pair (fall 2026), a further choice opened up: a student need not take both halves. Two constraints apply to that choice:

  • A student who wants 243B without 243A needs to already be comfortable programming in Python — not necessarily to the depth 243A itself teaches, but enough to not be learning the language and the statistical-computing content at the same time.
  • A Statistics MA student who wants to skip one half of the pair — rather than an outside student who was only ever going to take one — needs a waiver from the MA program, and has to demonstrate mastery of the material in the half being skipped.

The prerequisites for 243A and 243B are explicitly not the same as each other; the home page defers the detail to the syllabus rather than stating it.

What it expects on day one, and the first three weeks

Two kinds of background are expected coming in: a math/statistics background (specified in the syllabus, not on the home page itself) and familiarity with Python — or, failing that, a willingness to get up to speed in it quickly. The course does not assume the second is already in place: the opening weeks are explicitly built to bring everyone up to a common level in the bash shell and in Python at the same time, and are described, across all three years of the home page, as involving "a lot of moving pieces." The practical instruction that follows from this is to track the course schedule closely during that stretch rather than to arrive already fluent.

Sources

  • docs/statistical-computing/berkeley/stat243/fall-2024/home.md — converted from index.qmd, single-semester course structure, first-three-weeks note.
  • docs/statistical-computing/berkeley/stat243/fall-2025/home.md — converted from index.qmd, substantively identical to the fall-2024 page.
  • docs/statistical-computing/berkeley/stat243/fall-2026/home.md — converted from index.qmd, source of the 243A/243B split, the only-one-half policy, and the MA waiver rule.

All three pages refer to a syllabus (for the math/statistics prerequisite and, from fall 2026, the fact that 243A and 243B prerequisites differ) and to a course schedule; neither was supplied as input to this chapter, so their contents are not described here. Purely administrative detail present on the pages — survey links, specific registration deadlines, and the enrollment-permission process — has been left out as it does not bear on the course's structure or content.

← 10. Installing Git · Contents · 12. Version Control and Dynamic Documents →