Registering for STAT courses

Answers to FAQ when registering for STAT courses

Statistics and related sub-fields of Analytics and Data Science have grown in popularity in recent years, and as such, so have our STAT courses. Most fill very quickly during the registration period. The Department of Statistics wishes to offer our STAT courses to students of all disciplines, however, we have to ensure that students who are specifically required to take these courses can do so when they need them in order to graduate. For that reason, we are restricting enrollment for many of our courses during the early registration (i.e., Priority Registration) period each term and capping enrollments below maximum capacity in order to save seats for incoming Statistics students.

We do not maintain waitlists for STAT courses. If the course says “Closed” or the Remaining Seats is listed as “0,” it is full and we will not be providing overrides. Watch the official STAT Course Registration page for updates.

Registration Timeline

April (for Summer and Fall) / November (for Spring): Priority Registration exists for Stat, Stat/CS, and other majors who are specifically required to take certain upper-level STAT courses numbered 400 and above.

Early May / December: Priority Registration ends.  The restrictions will be removed. The restrictions will come off one course at a time throughout the day but not at specific predetermined times. We can not anticipate when a specific course will have its restriction lifted. Once the restriction for a course is lifted, any student in any major can sign up for courses with remaining seats as seen on Enterprise/Self-Service. Watch the official STAT Course Registration page for updates.

Once the number of remaining seats reach 0, the class is full. Additional seats are cannot be made available.

STAT Course Specifics

Please visit the Course Explorer to see course descriptions, prerequisites, and which are restricted and to whom during priority registration.

To help, we asked STAT faculty, “What can I expect from your STAT course in Spring 2017?” Answers appear below.

STAT 385: This is a newer offering that will allow further exploration into R and statistical programming methods with only a prerequisite of STAT 200/212. It will count as an advanced elective toward either the Stat Major or the Stat Minor. It is also a selected course for the Stat/CS Major.

STAT 361/CS 361: This course is a cross-listed one with CS. It is available for Stat/CS majors, but it is not for Statistics majors.

STAT 425, Prof. Narisetty and Prof. Park: STAT 425 covers both theory and applications of linear regression analysis and basic design of experiments. Requires knowledge of statistical tools and concepts from the course STAT 410. Basic background in linear algebra is assumed. Covers both linear regression and basic design and analysis of experiments. Other topics frequently covered are mixed models, binary regression, and Poisson regression.

The course is structured to have traditional lectures and grades based on homework and exams. R statistical language will be used for implementation of methods in class as well as for homework.

STAT 430, Prof. Dalpiaz: In Basics of Statistical Learning, you can expect to learn…

  • the fundamental theories of machine learning, from a statistical perspective. We will cover classification, regression, clustering, and related topics such as the bias-variance tradeoff, cross-validation, and dimension reduction.
  • the programming skills needed to use various machine learning techniques in R. We will spend a significant amount of time discussing best practices in R. We will highlight many of the most useful packages for machine learning.
  • literate programming through the use of RMarkdown for document creation. We will emphasize creating reproducible analyses.

Before taking my section of the STAT 430 course you should have…

  • learned the basics of linear regression. For example, you should know how to compare nested models with ANOVA and how to calculate a prediction interval.
  • either used R, or have prior programming experience. Understanding how to use lm() in R is a sufficient background.

STAT 448, Prof. Glosemeyer: The topics in the course include applications of descriptive statistics and visualization, hypothesis tests for population locations and distributional goodness of fit tests, basic introduction to categorical data analysis, ANOVA (balanced and unbalanced), simple and multiple linear regression, logistic regression, generalized linear models, PCA, hierarchical cluster analysis, and discriminant analysis (LDA and QDA) in a computational setting.

Additional Notes addressing FAQ

Concurrent degree seekers and triple majors (you should know who you are), if your current residency is in another college or Statistics is not your primary or secondary major, you are boxed out of the restriction. We still consider you a Stat major (because you are) even if the system can’t see it. Please contact stat-office@illinois.edu with your specific course and section requests so that we can help you.

For those looking to add Stat or Stat/CS as a major, until you formally change your major, you are still considered a non-major and we cannot provide overrides or otherwise assist you in getting into STAT courses. You should try to register for the STAT courses you need beginning Tuesday, May 3. The next curriculum change period when you can add Stat or Stat/CS begins Monday, August 15. If you become a Stat or Stat/CS major and contact the Undergraduate Advisor (David Unger, dunger@illinois.edu) by the first day of class (Monday, August 22), we can assist you with getting into the class(es) you need to make appropriate progress.

If the course you want is closed, that means it is full to instructional capacity. We cannot make an exception to provide an override or add an additional seat. The best thing to do is to check the course often and watch for someone else to drop. Dropped seats may become available for you to add at any time.

If the course you want has seats in a graduate section but is full in the undergraduate section, it means the course is full except for the graduate seats. We cannot make an exception to provide an override or add an additional seat. These seats are specifically meant for new incoming graduate students, and the university will not move them to the undergraduate side until they’ve confirmed that each new graduate student has completed registration. After they have all registered (often not until the end of the first week or even second week of the semester), the university reviews what is left and may make available the leftover seats to the undergraduate side, if any exist. The Statistics Department does not know exactly when the redistribution of unused graduate seats will happen, but historically it happens during Week 2 of the semester.

Neither Statistics faculty nor the main office maintain waitlists for our courses. We recommend that you continue to watch the registration site on Self-Service (Enterprise) for someone to drop and then add that seat on your own.

If you have any additional questions, please contact stat-reg@illinois.edu.

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