Course syllabus
Welcome to STA120 R programming for applied biostatistics!
Course information:
Study period: 1 September - 4 November 2025
Registration period: 25 August - 8 September
Examinations
Students with a documented disability who require extra writing time or other adaptions must report this to the course administrator before the course starts, but no later than four weeks before the exam. Please read the information before you fill in the application form.
As described in the Course syllabus, examination consists of four parts, each of which must be completed successfully
- an individual written assignment
- peer response to another student's assignment
- a second individual written assignment
- individual oral discussion of the second assignment
The primary objective is writing comprehensible R scripts that generate the intended and reproducible output(s).
The course consists of combined lectures/demonstrations and computer exercise sessions. Lectures/demonstrations are primarily on Tuesdays. Ideally you run the code provided in advance and shown in the lectures on your own device during class. This enables experimenting with the code with it and exploring different aspects of the output.
Computer exercise sessions are primarily on Fridays. Always begin by attempting the exercises yourself but ask for hints and support when stuck.
Full schedule (The schedule is preliminary and may change up to two weeks before the course starts)
Literature list (More suggested readings may be added later)
Contact information
Course leader: Koen Simons, koen.simons@gu.se
Examinator: Martin Adiels, martin.adiels@wlab.gu.se
Course administrator: Karin Riegnell, karin.riegnell@gu.se 031-786 37 19
Visiting adress: Guldhedsgatan 5A, plan 4, Göteborg (for visits, please make an appointment by e-mail or telephone)
Postal adress: Göteborgs universitet, Hälsovetenskapligt centrum, Box 453, 405 30 Göteborg
General student information
Registration, results and certificates
Course image
The image at the top of this page was generated using perchance.org ai image generator and the prompt "franco-belgian color comic about A screen displaying computer code with syntax highlighting and indentation as well a scatter-plot graph and the message "data is computing"., bande dessinée, franco-belgian comic panel, masterpiece, breathtaking composition, intricate, detailed, best quality" It corresponds poorly to the intended output - as it displays a histogram instead of a scatter-plot - and it is not reproducible - despite providing the prompt - however, the surprising result is appropriate. The snippets of code are literally obscure and illegible, perhaps even mystical as it does look like there's multiple alphabets and symbols involved. The purpose of STA120 is reading and writing code, becoming comfortable and familiar with simple scripts.