Wolfram Statistics Course Assistant

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This app is a ***terrible*** tool for a statistics class. The interface is not user friendly and it is painfully difficult to input data. There is also no way to compare across data sets once each set is entered - you have to start all over again. Most of the tools such as those for probability and data relationships, will never be of use to a real student in a class...the tools that we actually need, like for ANOVA, are not included. Save your money and do NOT purchase this app.

This app computes several basic statistics for selected distributions such as the normal and binomial. Basic descriptive statistics are also computed for arbitrary data sets input by the user. Bar charts, histograms, and scatterplots are produced and displayed. The app's best feature is the calculation of probabilities for several distributions. The limitations are serious but not disabling. Graphing and descriptive statistics are limited by the fact that data entry is strictly manual, one data point at a time. This means that only small data sets are practical to use. The worst limitation is that there is no means to save or print the results. So a student using the app for homework must copy the output by hand. This is not an issue for numerical output such as a mean or a probability, but it is a big issue for the plots. The best feature of the app and the main reason I would recommend the app to my statistics students is the probability calculations, which allow the student to avoid using tables.

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Statistics is about data, and the biggest drawback of this app is that the interface for inputting data is lousy. At best, this serves as a simple calculator for toy problems. No way any student could examine a real data set with hundreds of rows and more than two variables. Even including two variables is awkward here, because they must be input in (x1,y1), (x2,y2)....format. The graphics are fine (hence two stars) and there are some nice interactive touches, but this is a toy. As an intermediate step between toy and data analysis device, it might be nice if they would include some pre-installed real data sets that include an interesting context and demonstrate that the analyses actually can contribute to knowledge about real phenomenon.

I expected so much more from Wolfram. StatViz is a much more intuitive and comprehensive program. Where are the confidence intervals, hypothesis tests or ANOVA. The distributions are sparse. I can only hope that updates will be free and add much more functionality. This project seems like it was rushed out the door.

I would like to see combination and permutation calculations added. It would be cool if you could enter data from a chart, maybe a 3x3 or configurable rows & columns, and figure out the probability. I don't believe I saw a z-score calculator but that would be nice too.