HOW SHOULD STATISTICS BE THOUGHT, WHAT THE STUDENTS’ OPINION IS?

Abstract

Since 2014 statistical educational practice has been modernized on Budapest Business School. The nature of this change was the conversion onto a computerised, engine room educational form. This change was a challenge for teacher and student as well. Our College began to teach statistics in practice fully conducted in MS Excel beside normal theoretical lectures. The development of the students' results was followed. The evaluation of the student’s results is a complex process that shouldn’t be described by the grades. Grades and results are influenced by several factors. Among these factors, computerised teaching method is only one of them. Our aim is to provide useful knowledge for the students that can be applied in their future carrier.
Teaching statistics on computer is well-founded, due to the fact that the advanced level of competency in using MS Excel is an important expectation of the labour market in many fields. On the one hand computers simplify the data analysis process, but the other hand gives little insights into the meaning of calculations.
Teaching methodologies should be monitored in order to make necessary adjustments. For this purpose, we investigated the students’ opinion via a questionnaire on some related aspects. The groups of questions covered the following ranges: the feasibility of the syllabus, the number of lectures, the types and effectiveness of the exercises, the overall usefulness of the covered material and the computer-based teaching of statistics. The analysis of the obtained answers showed differences in the opinion of Tourism and Catering compared to Commerce and Marketing students in some of the above aspects. The reasons behind these differences were subsequently investigated.
The information gained by analyzing the questionnaire will highly serve our teaching work of statistics, and we should thank it to the students.