Math 461 Test 2, Fall 2006

Friday 3 November, in class, worth 20%.
You may not use books, notes, written materials, or electronic devices.
Practice Test 2 2005 and Solutions.

Office hours before the test:
4-5pm Monday 30 (in my office Altgeld 376),
4-5pm Tuesday 31 (in Altgeld 341),
4-5pm Wednesday 1 (in Altgeld 341),
3-4:30pm Thursday 2 (in my office Altgeld 376).

Material
Sections 4.1-4.9 (omit Zeta distribution), 5.1-5.7 (omit Hazard Rate, and Weibull and Beta distributions), and all homework on that material.
For Sec. 5.6 and 5.7, suitable exercises to try would be # 37, 39, 40, 41 on page 241.
Use your lecture notes and homework as a guide to the emphasis you should place on the various topics.

How to study

• First make summary notes of the important definitions and methods from each section. (This forces you to mentally organize the material!)
• If you just work problems without first making summary notes, you will probably be wasting your time, because you won't have a mental framework into which to fit the examples you are working.
• Learn the standard densities from your two handouts, on "discrete" and "continuous" densities, along with the formulas for their expectations and variances. (OK, you can skip the hypergeometric formulas.)
• Learn the interpretation of each kind of random variable (e.g. an exponential random variable represents a waiting time for a Poisson event).
• Re-work all homework problems. For each one, explain what technique or theoretical point is being illustrated.
• Work through the practice test. Of course some topics covered in class are not touched on the practice test, but they might appear on the test this semester.