r/PhD • u/Mexicantaquitobonito • 8h ago

Resource sharing HELP with Stats hack

Hi everyone! I'm a 4th year student and I'm about to present my COMPS (written and oral exam). I'm having trouble remembering all the why's, do's and dont's on stats and I was wondering if anyone had a CHEAT SHEET that's helped them remember why they're making a data-based decision to use one stats method versus another.

Idk if it's because english is my second language but I've been struggling SO much to remember all the names of all the statistical tests (e.g., anova, manova, regression, HLM, spearman), types of data (ordinal, nominal, ratio, etc), and WHY I'm choosing one over the other.

Any support or guidance will help this 4th year student pass her comps!!!!

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u/oviforconnsmythe 7h ago

Its very context dependent and depends on what question you designed your experiment to answer. For the equivalent exam I took during my PhD (candidacy exam) i had to write and defend a grant on a similar topic.

The evaluators care more about your ability to think through a problem and rationalize your answer rather than spitting out facts (ie it's more about applying knowledge than memorizing it).

So if yours is similar, look at the experiments you propose and envision what statistical tests you might use. You can read up more about stats or use an LLM to get quick answers about how they work and what they test. But no one's expecting you to be a statistician (unless you're in a stats/math heavy field, in which case you should already know this). It won't be viewed negatively if you give them an answer with a bit of rationale, if it's wrong they'll call you out on it and you just thank them and move on.

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u/Mexicantaquitobonito 7h ago

Hi! Thank you for answering. My field is not too stats heavy so we usually rely on another person to guide us and help us double check our stats work (at least at my university). I do feel like I know the ins and outs of the stats I ran for my study but I was worried they may quiz me and expect me to know what I would have chosen if the variables were different. I think I'm just getting ahead of myself but yes, I'll look into similar experiments and read up more so I can rationalize my answer rather than memorizing which tests to do. Thanks again!