Amazon Customer Reviews

When AP exams finally come along, many students realize (like myself and my friends), that we crammed the material before each class exam but never really committed it to memory. So, to save ourselves from getting lousy scores, we turn to prep books. Barron's has served me well in the past, so my friends and I all bought copies of this before the AP...and it was a lifesaver.

Spending about four hours a day the week before the exam with this book worked wonders! It explained every statistical concept that we'd learned previously in a very clear, cogent manner (in fact, I really felt like I'd learned something after I read this). And, in true Barron's fashion, it left nothing untouched. From regression equations to chi-square tests, this book covers it all. And not only do you get a review of the material, you really get a comprehensive treatment of the material but in a less "frilly" and frivolous manner, so you don't have to wade through hundreds of lines of silly talk as is seen in so many textbooks.

So, after reading this book and doing ALL of the exercises (they're harder than the real thing, so if you practice with these, you'll be set), I was well prepared for the AP statistics exam. When I took it, there wasn't a thing on there that I didn't know how to do, and it's largely thanks to this book!

If you're looking to learn AP stats independently or are looking to brush up on course material before exams, then don't waste your time with any other stats book...read this one, and get that 5!

Barron's AP Stats Prep book is what got me my 5. I spent the year in Stats class not paying attention, not doing homework, and for the most part not understanding a single thing about stats. 2 weeks before the exam I went through Barron's front to back, and got a 5! The information is organized in an easy to use fashion, and there's plenty of practice problems.

This is probably the best AP Statistics book out there. It's very comprehensive and detailed.
If you read and understand most of the material on here, there's almost no reason you will not get a 4 or 5.
The only problem is with the practice tests. Many of the questions in the practice tests involve number crunching rather then testing if you know the concepts of statistics. When i took this test, i was quite surprised to see that almost all the questions were concept questions. I barely touched my calculator on this exam.

One thing that is seriously annoying about this otherwise solid book is that the author is apparently a major fan of professional basketball, and thinks nothing of interlarding the text with dozens of arcane references to the sport.

Here's an example:

"Consider the historgram of the yearly average assists per game figures for Jeff Hornacek (Phoenix and Houston)." (p. 11) As if it's not enough to mention an obscure player, must we pedantically specify that he played with both Phoenix and Houston?! (This is incorrect anyhow: it should be Phoenix and Philadelphia.) Surely this silliness will help to confuse any foreign or ESL user of this text.

Thus if you're unclear on such basketball abstrusia as rebounds, assists, and three-point shots, this book is likely to strike you as a self-indulgent slog.

On the other hand, if you love basketball as much as Sternstein evidently does, you'll find the text both invigorating and relevant.

this book provides a very comprehensive review of the whole course. i read all of the sections and did all the practice problems at the end of each section. though i didn't have much time working on the 6 practice tests, the information i got from the review part itself helped me greatly on the AP test. i just took it a couple weeks ago and im confident that i got a 5 on it. w0000t