Overview

The School of Mathematics and Statistics is proud to announce a collaborative venture with SAS to provide a practical introduction to the management and analysis of data. Large data sets are now found widely in business, finance, bioinformatics, government, intelligence and elsewhere, and skills in querying, cleaning, managing, displaying and analysing data are widely sought.

The course will provide the opportunity for SAS certification in Base Programming (as well as normal academic credit) (cost for the SAS exam: about $65). Sample questions for the exam can be viewed. This will give you an insight into what skills you will acquire by the end of the course. During the summer after the course, SAS will operate a work experience placement program. See the story on the first running of the course and the work placement program.

The MATH2871 course overview can be seen below.

Units of credit: 6

Prerequisites: MATH1041 or ECON1203 or PSY2001 or MATH1231 or MATH1241 or MATH1251 or DPST1014 or equivalent

Cycle of offering: Term 1

Graduate attributes: The course will enhance your research, inquiry and analytical thinking abilities.

More information: The course outline contains information about course objectives, assessment, course materials and the syllabus.

Important additional information as of 2023

UNSW Plagiarism Policy

The University requires all students to be aware of its policy on plagiarism.

For courses convened by the School of Mathematics and Statistics no assistance using generative AI software is allowed unless specifically referred to in the individual assessment tasks.

If its use is detected in the no assistance case, it will be regarded as serious academic misconduct and subject to the standard penalties, which may include 00FL, suspension and exclusion.

The Online Handbook entry contains up-to-date timetabling information.

If you are currently enrolled in MATH2871, you can log into UNSW Moodle for this course.

Course aims

The course, which is a collaborative venture of the School of Mathematics and Statistics with SAS, aims to provide a practical introduction to the management and analysis of data. Large data sets are found widely in business, finance, bioinformatics, government, intelligence, etc . Skills in querying, cleaning, managing, displaying and analysing data, which is widely sought, will be developed in this course.

The course will provide you the opportunity to take the SAS certification in Base Programming. There is a fee to sit this SAS exam and will stated later. SAS runs this certification at UNSW. After the course, SAS operates a work experience placement program. Please consult SAS webpage for further information.

Course description

The course covers the use of database and spreadsheet tools to organise and query statistical data, programming in an advanced statistical package for file management, data manipulation and cleaning; methods for data screening, cleaning, graphical displays and data analysis using a range of statistical procedures; creation of data analysis reports using modern statistical and graphical methods. The course is based around Microsoft Access and Excel as well as the SAS statistical analysis system and programming tools. Knowledge and skills developed will be generic and applicable to a range of modern statistical software tools.