SAS Joint Certificate Program

The SAS Joint Certificate Program specifies that SAS be used wherever appropriate and possible in at least four courses¹ (16 quarter units) and that a capstone experience involving SAS be completed. At Cal Poly, the choice of software for many upper division courses is at the instructor's discretion.

Courses where SAS is included as part of the course

• STAT 330 - Statistical Computing with SAS (4 units)
• STAT 440 - SAS (Base) Certification Preparation (2 units)
• STAT 441 (470) - SAS (Advanced) Certification Preparation (2 units)​

Courses where SAS may be included at instructor's discretion

• STAT 323 – Design and Analysis of Experiments I (4 units)
• STAT 324 – Applied Regression Analysis (4 units)
• STAT 416 - Statistical Analysis of Time Series (4 units)
• STAT 417 - Survival Analysis Methods (4 units)
• STAT 418 - Analysis of Cross-Classified Data (4 units)
• STAT 419 - Applied Multivariate Statistics (4 units)
• STAT 421 – Survey Sampling and Methodology
• STAT 423 - Design and Analysis of Experiments II (4 units)
• STAT 465 - Statistical Communication and Consulting (4 units)

Capstone Experience

• STAT 461, 462 - Senior Project² (3 units)

Certificate Requirements

The SAS Joint Certificate Program at Cal Poly has the following requirements totaling 19 quarter units.

Students are required to apply for the joint certificate program.  The application outlines the relevant courses (from the preceding list) that they have taken and plan to take to count toward the certificate.  The application will be reviewed and accepted by the certificate program advisors in order for the student to participate in the joint certificate program.  If the student is unable to meet the requirements for one of the proposed courses, for example, due to a lower grade than expected, they will be allowed to substitute another course by filing out a course amendment proposal and obtaining approval from the certificate advisors.

Students are required to take at least 4 courses (not including the capstone experience) from the preceding list totaling 16 quarter units. To obtain the certificate, the student must maintain 3.0 GPA across the approved courses.

In addition to the four courses, students must also use SAS as the primary software package for programming and analysis of their capstone experience, STAT 461 and 462. To obtain the certificate, the student must receive a grade of B- or better in these capstone courses.

A portfolio will be required and evaluated by the joint certificate advisors for each student in the certificate program. This portfolio will include, for each course:

• A class project (or additional project for courses not taught with SAS) that uses SAS programming as part of the data preparation and/or analysis.

OR

• A major homework assignment that uses SAS programming as part of the data preparation and/or analysis (for courses taught with SAS but that do not have projects).

For courses that do not use SAS as the primary language, students are required to complete an additional project that uses SAS in that topic area.  The advisors of the proposed certificate program will oversee the design, analytic plan, and review of these additional projects.  For courses that use SAS as the primary language, the student will be permitted to submit a class project (preferred) or major homework assignment that uses SAS for their portfolio.

Certificate Program Benefits

The certificate program is designed to give students the opportunity to obtain a professionally recognized joint certificate to acknowledge their experience in analytic programming with SAS.  This program couples nicely with the currently established SAS certification courses at Cal Poly in that for this program student accomplishments are project based while the certification courses are test based. The portfolio of SAS based projects and assignments will provide students with an organized collection of work that will speak to their experience for future job searches.

Please contact Hunter Glanz via email at hglanz@calpoly.edu or Rebecca Ottesen at rottesen@calpoly.edu with any questions or to obtain the application form.

1

SAS does not have to be used in every course; however, there will be additional requirements for courses that do not use SAS as the primary software (see section 3 Certificate Requirements).

2

The senior project involves at least 90 hours of work advised by a Statistics faculty member on a suitably thorough Statistics-related project ranging from survey/experimental design to analysis/modeling to consulting or some combination of these.