What Happens to Students Who Skip Their Major’s Required Statistics Course
Required statistics courses sit at gateways to many majors. A study tracking students who took the course on time versus those who deferred it reveals patterns that should inform student planning.
There are dozens of undergraduate majors that require a statistics course. In most departments, this is a sophomore-level course, and it serves as a prerequisite for upper-level courses that apply statistical methods. Many students, however, take statistics late, often in their junior or senior year. A 2025 study by researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of Florida followed 5,400 students who completed the required statistics course by the end of their fourth year of undergraduate study. The researchers compared the later performance of three groups of students: those who took the course on time in their sophomore year of study, those who took the course in their junior year of study, and those who took the course in their senior year of study.
The study was based on a survey of 5,400 students, at the University of Maryland and the University of Florida, who completed a required statistics course by the time they were in their fourth year of college. These students were surveyed on when they completed the statistics requirement (sophomore year of college, junior year of college, or senior year of college) and how they performed in subsequent college courses that used statistical methods. Test it.
The Deferred Statistics Pattern
Sophomore vs. junior deferred statistics takers have similar pass rates but a .3 grade lower than takers of the class on schedule. However, senior deferred takers have a 19% failure rate compared to the 11% failure rate of takers of the class on schedule (sophomores). There is likely to be some anxiety avoiding the class and then, once scheduled, additional anxiety due to already being an older undergraduate and being under even greater time pressure to complete the class and other requirements.
Students who were senior-year deferrers tended to be students who were anxious or thought they would be unable to do well in the statistics course. Rather than dealing with the anxiety and trying to take the course when they were sophomores, they pushed it off to later. By the time they got to senior year, the material had not gotten any easier, there would have been time to take other mathematics courses, and there would be pressure to finish the course to graduate.
The Upper-Division Effect
Students who had delayed their statistics course also were enrolled in many upper-division courses that utilized statistics methods but for which the students lacked prerequisite knowledge for. The lack of prerequisite knowledge for these upper-division statistics utilizing courses affected the students’ performance in those upper-division courses negatively, whether or not a department had granted the student a waiver of prerequisites in order to permit the student to enroll in the scheduled courses. Students performed well in upper-division research methods, advanced biology, advanced economics, etc. as long as they had taken statistics prior to those upper-division courses. Students performed poorly in same courses of upper-division research methods, advanced biology, advanced economics, etc. when the students had not taken statistics prior to taking the upper-division courses. The pattern held whether or not a department of the university had granted a student a waiver of prerequisites in order to permit the student to enroll in scheduled upper-division statistics utilizing courses. Thus, the lack of prerequisite knowledge for upper-division courses for which a student has delayed taking a prerequisite statistics course causes significant problems for the student even when all scheduled courses in which the student is enrolled have been approved by the department(s) involved.
Students who took their statistics course concurrently with the upper-division course for which it was a prerequisite, or before the upper-division course, performed as well on the upper-division course as did students who took the upper-division course first and then took statistics. However, as soon as the sequencing of the two courses was disrupted, so too did the students’ performance on the upper-division course.
The Cognitive Cost of Avoidance
The cognitive cost to students of avoiding to take a difficult required statistics course in sophomore year is considerable. It may take them all the way to their senior year before they have worked hard enough to overcome their avoidance of the course. Students report anxiety at various levels throughout their college years and particularly persistent low-grade anxiety until they have worked through the statistics required for their major. For many the avoiding of taking the required statistics course in sophomore year gives them brief relief from their anxiety until they find another required upper-division research methods or advanced biology or economics, etc. major course in which they need to apply the statistics that they had avoided in sophomore year, at which time their avoidance of required course work in sophomore year is revealed to them as having given them only brief relief from the anxiety which in fact persisted throughout their college years until they had worked to fulfill their anxiety about taking that required difficult statistics course in sophomore year of college. The relief from that anxiety is huge and persists throughout the students subsequent years of life. I have changed my mind on this issue more than once but at present hold this to be the case.
“Students who take statistics in their sophomore year of college have completed the course by the time they’re in their junior year of college. So they don’t have to worry about statistics anymore. Students who take statistics in their junior year of college and students who take statistics in their senior year of college — some of them are trying to avoid taking the course in the first place. They’ve been putting off the course for two or three years already, and then they finally take it in their junior year of college or in their senior year of college. And they work really hard to complete the course, harder than they would have to work if they had taken the course in their sophomore year of college in the first place.”
The Sequencing Question
While waiting to take a required course can feel daunting to you, it is best that you follow the sequencing that your university recommends. In most cases, university staff have thoughtfully planned the sequence in which students take courses. They typically know more about the requirements for successful completion of a given course than a student does.
“Students really have no idea about course sequencing that is known by the University, which is that students who take courses in the ‘recommended sequence’ will perform better than students taking the courses in any other sequence. Exceptions to this rule are rare enough to be not worth trying.”
What Students Often Get Wrong
One of the largest error patterns identified in the study of students who deferred statistics was taking a host of introductory math courses early in a student’s academic career, only to wait several semesters or even years to take subsequent quantitative classes such as statistics. Students who wait extended periods of time to take statistics allow mathematical fluency afforded by a prior quantitative course to atrophy significantly. This atrophy can be largely invisible to a student. And though a student may have done well in a prior math course, it is common for such a student to perform poorly in subsequent quantitative classes.
This pattern holds true for many skills that are taught in university-level coursework. Those skills tend to decay at different rates and with different degrees of visibility than others, but the bottom line is that there is some amount of time during which students can allow to pass between related courses before they begin to arrive at later courses with substantially weaker preparation than their peers who maintained a good sequence of related courses.
What Helped Students Who Were Behind
Interventions to support struggling students, who had been forced to defer statistics for a variety of reasons, were also found to improve their outcomes. These included taking a math review course, formal or informal, at the same time that they were taking statistics, working with a tutor during the first three weeks of the statistics course to make sure that they had the necessary background before the course got too far ahead, and meeting with the course instructor at the beginning of the course to get individualized advice about how to best prepare for the course. As with the scheduled case, the key to these interventions is that they are implemented early on, before students have fallen so far behind that it is too late to catch up.
Getting students back on track with on-schedule taking of the required quantitative and statistics courses is far easier to do for students who are behind in statistics by seeking help early in the course rather than waiting until after getting mid-term grades. I have worked with two students in 2024 and one in 2026 for long periods of time after they had stopped taking on-schedule required quantitative and statistics courses. Although in each case the students worked hard and seemed to be making good progress in the end, in each case, the student’s performance in the subsequent semester was not as good as it would have been had they been taking the required quantitative and statistics courses on-schedule in the first place.
The Anxiety Treatment Question
A subset of the students who had deferred statistics, meaning put off taking statistics, had done so due to mathematics anxiety. Such students have been the target of various studies on anxiety in mathematics. And while such studies generally have found that that anxiety can impede learning of mathematics, researchers have identified interventions of a cognitive behavioral nature that have reduced students’ math anxiety in various studies. The good news here for anxious students contemplating taking statistics is that such anxiety could likely be alleviated in a number of sessions and that a few universities are already conducting anxiety workshops on statistics for such students, with results so far which are very good.
Students who address the anxiety often find that the statistics course itself is less difficult than they had assumed. The avoidance had been creating most of the problem.
Implications for Students
If you are a student thinking about deferring a few years ahead of time about whether or not to “defer” a course (put it off for a few years until you are further along in your university studies), then it is good to know that there is research indicating that it is best to take prerequisites for upper-division quantitative university courses on time (that is, as soon as you have completed all of the required lower-division prerequisites). In addition, if you are worried about mathematics anxiety interfering with your ability to learn statistics (or another quantitative university course), there are now proven anxiety treatments that you can use before starting the course to decrease your anxiety (which no doubt is part of what is preventing you from taking the course in the first place). For example, some universities now even offer mathematics anxiety workshops before the start of a statistics course.
If you have put off statistics for a few years (even though you have already taken math and/or science prerequisites), and are worried about taking a very hard class, you should register for it and commit to getting help during the first 3 weeks of the semester. As time passes, the course becomes increasingly difficult.
The Larger Pattern
In a related line of research about the sequencing of undergraduate courses, the statistics-deferral study is part of the body of evidence indicating that the recommended sequence of courses as set forth by a university is generally better for students than a different, haphazard sequence. There are occasional exceptions, but these are so rare as to be not worth the risk to a student of not following the recommended sequence. Moreover, it is in the university’s best interest to communicate to students the reasoning behind the recommended sequence. Such institutions typically get better outcomes from their students than do institutions that merely list out a set of required courses without explaining why they are to be taken in a particular order.
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