“…Sullivan will help my students be more successful. The writing style and some of the pedagogy seems to go further towards putting the students at ease and alleviating their fears.” Kevin Bodden, Lewis & Clark Community College
"...[Sullivan] finds examples and problems that are current and relevant. As an instructor that motivates me and in turn the students tend to be more motivated." Rita Kolb, The Community College of Baltimore County
Comprehensive and Valuable Resources
Powered by CourseCompass and MathXL, MyMathLab provides a rich and flexible set of course materials useful to both Instructors and Students. Using MyMathLab Instructors create and assign online homework and tests that are automatically graded and tightly correlated to the text. Manage students’ results in a powerful online gradebook and can customize their course to their course objectives. Access the multi-media textbook and all instructor and student supplements.
Using MyMathLab Students Practice concepts with unlimited tutorial exercises that are closely correlated to the exercises in the text. Access the multi-media textbook with links to learning aids, such as videos and student supplements (Student Solutions Manual, PowerPoint Presentations, etc.,)
Available Fall 2006
The Student Study Pack provides comprehensive materials designed to enhance students’ study experience! It includes the Student SolutionsManual, CD-lecture videos, Visual Calculus software and access to Pearson Tutor Center Available Fall 2006.
Mike Sullivan III is a professor of mathematics at Joliet Junior College. He holds graduate degrees from DePaul University in both mathematics and economics. Mike is an author or co-author on more than 20 books, including a statistics book and a developmental mathematics series.
Statistics is an important and practical subject, and Sullivan does a great job bringing in a variety of concrete examples of application. In fact there are always more than enough practice exercises. I'm not going to give a full review, but note a couple key observations. We were working from a hard and softcover edition, and they differed in the number of chapters and topics included. I did not discover this until we were underway. There were some times when I had a hard time understanding what Sullivan was trying to communicate formulaically even when I thought I understood the concept. I prefer Salman Khan's approach of explaining the intuition, and using the formula if it helps. I certainly consulted Khan Academy and other resources to get through this book at home with my kids. Some of the applications of standard deviation were challenging for me. I really appreciated having the teacher's edition solutions for half of the problems.
The online portion and class course can be manageable, but the book itself it terrible for anyone who is totally new to statistics. It explains everything in the most math-savvy way possible. Which you’d think makes sense, right? Well if you don’t know half the terms in a vital point of explanation, you are going to be lost for a good while rummaging through chapters or Google just to understand the meaning of a sentence, and thats if the way it is worded isn't over the top. If i were to generalize the way the book explains everything, imagine if someone wrote the book exactly as a normal person would, and then someone else took the whole book and switched out half the words for less commonly used words off of thesaurus.com and key words at the end of chapters from other chapters/books in order to save word space. You're left with something that primarily only makes sense to people who already have a strong understanding of the subject. the book should open the opportunity to teach yourself where another person cannot, but this book does no such thing. If you have a confusing professor, i sincerely hope you have the means and the resources to learn from something other than the book.
———————————2.5/5 stars——————————— It’s not just that statistics is a terrible class, I just hate the way textbooks are written when they can explain concepts in more plain terms. I do like that it includes instructions for ti 83/84, minitab, and excel though. Some things weren’t completely explained, and it took me a while to understand where they were coming from in some examples.
I can't say I really liked this book, because I really don't like the subject matter. I took statistics about 20 years ago and really hated it. I just took it again for a different degree program, and I have to say that this particular text made statistics more enjoyable than the first time around. The text was easy to follow, and the online component was a great learning tool.
poorly organized. NOT user friendly in the slightest. needed more page references to the frequently used charts to help you more easily navigate this behemoth. wouldn’t recommend.
This isn't the exact book but it's the closest I could find. The one I'm reading is a custom edition for my school. I wasn't a fan of this book but only because it has to do with math and I am TERRIBLE at math.