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.
32. Scheduling information¶
What this covers¶
STAT 243 is a statistical computing course, and this chapter collects the administrative shape of the term rather than any statistical or computational content: how the two in-class assessments, the term project, and the opening weeks' labs and self-study assignments are organised. The course has run at least three times — Fall 2024, Fall 2025, and Fall 2026 — and the schedule page for each offering is drawn on here, since the assessment format and the required early work both changed from year to year. This assumes only that the reader is following (or considering) the course and wants to know how the term's work is timed, not any prior background.
In-class assessments¶
Every offering places two closed, in-person assessments during the term — one in October, one close to the end of November — each preceded by a review session held a few days earlier in section. What differs across years is the name given to the assessment and, in Fall 2026, whether it is split by course number:
| Offering | Name | Assessment 1 | Review 1 | Assessment 2 | Review 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fall 2024 | Quiz | Wed Oct 23, in class | Fri Oct 18 | Mon Nov 25, in class | Fri Nov 22 |
| Fall 2025 | Mini-exam | Oct 22, in class | Oct 17 | Nov 24, in class | Nov 21 |
| Fall 2026 | Exam (243A / 243B) | Mon Oct 12, in class | Oct 9 | Mon Nov 23, in class | Nov 20 |
The Fall 2024 schedule additionally splits Quiz 1 by room and last name: students with last names A–T sit it in Evans 60, and V–Z in Evans 340.
The term project¶
Fall 2024 and Fall 2025 both carry a term project, with the due date given only as "TBD during exam week" at the time the schedule page was written. The Fall 2026 schedule, as given here, does not mention a project at all.
Labs and self-study before the term is under way¶
All three offerings share the same shape for the first two weeks:
- An optional command-line help session — "Lab 0" in 2024 and 2025, "Lab A0" in 2026 — held the week before classes start (August 30 in 2024 and 2025, August 28 in 2026). Unlike every later lab it is walk-in: students can arrive at any time to get software installed, get access to a UNIX-style command line, and work through a "UNIX basics" tutorial. The expectation is that this is done, and command-line basics are at least underway, before the first class meeting of the following week.
- The first mandatory, section-specific lab — "Lab 1" in 2024 and 2025, "Lab A1" in 2026 — on Git, setting up a GitHub repository for problem sets, and Quarto for dynamic documents. Held September 6 (2024), September 5 (2025), September 4 (2026). Students are asked to attend only the section they are registered for, given room capacity, unless they have arranged otherwise with the instructor.
- An optional library LaTeX session, recommended in each year's schedule "in particular if you are a Statistics graduate student": even a student who will write problem sets in Quarto, Jupyter notebooks, or R Markdown rather than LaTeX directly still needs LaTeX math syntax, since that is the syntax those tools render.
Fall 2024 and Fall 2025 additionally set two pieces of self-study, graded only as complete or not, submitted through Gradescope, with no requirement on formatting, commentary, or even whether the answers are typed or handwritten:
- A bash shell tutorial, to be worked through by September 9 (2024) or September 8 (2025), skipping the tutorial's pages on regular expressions and on managing processes. The first ten problems from the tutorial's accompanying exercises are submitted separately.
- Fall 2024 only, a follow-up on regular expressions: reading the regex page of the same tutorial and submitting answers to a separate set of regex practice problems by September 13.
Neither of these two assignments appears in the Fall 2026 schedule as given here.
Sources¶
- Fall 2024 schedule:
docs/statistical-computing/berkeley/stat243/fall-2024/schedule.md, converted fromschedule.qmd(berkeley-stat243, fall-2024 offering; CC BY 4.0) — quizzes, project, and notes on assignments and activities. - Fall 2025 schedule:
docs/statistical-computing/berkeley/stat243/fall-2025/schedule.md, converted fromschedule.qmd(berkeley-stat243, fall-2025 offering; CC BY 4.0) — mini-exams, project, and notes on assignments and activities. - Fall 2026 schedule:
docs/statistical-computing/berkeley/stat243/fall-2026/schedule.md, converted fromschedule.qmd(berkeley-stat243, fall-2026 offering; CC BY 4.0) — exams and notes on assignments and activities.
No slides, transcript, or problem set were supplied for this chapter; all three sources are pages of course logistics rather than lecture content, which is why no worked examples or exercises appear above.
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