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This archived information is dated to the 2008-09 academic year only and may no longer be current.

For currently applicable policies and information, see the current Stanford Bulletin.

Master of Science in Statistics

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Graduate Programs in Statistics

The department requires that the student take 45 units of work from offerings in the Department of Statistics or from authorized courses in other departments. Ordinarily, four or five quarters are needed to complete all requirements.

Students must fulfill the following requirements for the M.S. degree:

  1. STATS 116, 191, 200, and 217. All must be taken for a letter grade. Courses previously taken may be waived by the adviser, in which case they must be replaced by other graduate courses offered by the department.
  2. One of MATH 103, 113, 115, 171; and one of CS 106A, 106X, 137, 138. Substitution of other courses in Mathematics and Computer Science may be made with consent of the adviser.
  3. At least four additional Statistics courses from graduate offerings in the department (202-399). All must be taken for a letter grade. Consent of the adviser is required in order to take more than six units of STATS 260ABC, 298, 299, 390, or 399.
  4. Additional elective units to complete the requirements may be chosen from the list available from the department web site. Other graduate courses (200 or above) may be authorized by the adviser if they provide skills relevant to statistics or deal primarily with an application of statistics or probability and do not overlap courses in the student's program. There is sufficient flexibility to accommodate students with interests in applications to business, computing, economics, engineering, health, operations research, and biological and social sciences.
  5. Courses below 200 level are generally not acceptable, with the following exceptions: STATS 116, 191; MATH 103, 113, 115, 171, 180; CS 106A, 106B, 106X, 137, 138. At most, one of these two courses may be counted: (1) MATH 151 or STATS 116, (2) MATH 103 or MATH 113.

Students with a strong mathematical background who may wish to go on to a Ph.D. in Statistics should consider applying to the Ph.D. program.

The eight Statistics courses required for the M.S. degree must be taken for letter grades, and an overall 2.75 grade point average (GPA) is required.

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