The School of Mathematics 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) and during the summer after the course SAS will operate an optional work experience placement program. Sample questions for the exam can be viewed here. This will give you an idea of what you should be able to do 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.

SAS also offers a prize of $1000 for best result in the course.

For some idea of how widely skills in data management are sought in the workplace, search Seek for Location: Sydney, Work Type: full time and keyword: SAS.

The MATH2871 course overview can be seen below.

Units of credit: 6

Prerequisites: MATH1041 or Econ1203 or ECON2292 or PSY2001 or MATH1231 or MATH1241 or MATH1251 or equivalent.

Cycle of offering: yearly in Semester 2.

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

More information: this recent course handout (pdf) contains information about course objectives, assessment, course materials and the syllabus. (This pdf will usually be updated by the end of the first week of the semester.)

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

If you are currently enrolled in MATH2871, you can log into the My eLearning Vista instance of this course.

Use of database and spreadsheet tools to organize and query statistical data, programming in an advanced statistical package for file management, data manipulation and 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 will be based around 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.