Pre-Business school statistics

By Prof. Sudeep Bapat | IIT Bombay

Learners enrolled: 341 | Exam registration: 3

ABOUT THE COURSE:

This course equips incoming business school students with the statistical thinking and analytical tools essential for success in an MBA program. Focused on real-world business scenarios, it emphasizes practical applications over theory. Students will learn how to interpret data, assess uncertainty, model, forecast, and make data-driven decisions across marketing, finance, and operations. No prior background in statistics is required—just curiosity and a willingness to think quantitatively.

INTENDED AUDIENCE: An undergraduate in any field who is interested in pursuing an MBA. Student should have an inclination towards data analytics.

INDUSTRY SUPPORT: Companies across areas who work on data driven decision making, modelling, analytics etc.

Summary

Course Status :	Upcoming
Course Type :	Elective
Language for course content :	English
Duration :	4 weeks
Category :	Management Studies
Credit Points :	1
Level :	Undergraduate
Start Date :	16 Feb 2026
End Date :	13 Mar 2026
Enrollment Ends :	16 Feb 2026
Exam Registration Ends :	27 Feb 2026
Exam Date :	19 Apr 2026 IST
NCrF Level	4.5 — 8.0

Note: This exam date is subject to change based on seat availability. You can check final exam date on your hall ticket.

Page Visits

Course layout

Week 1: Introduction to business statistics and decision-making, types of data, measures of central tendency, measures of dispersion, business case study.

Week 2: Probability and distributions, binomial and normal distributions, central limit theorem and its importance, business application.

Week 3: Inferential statistics, sampling techniques and biases, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing, p-values, type I and type II errors, business case study.

Week 4: Further topics in predictive modelling, correlation, regression, logistic regression etc., final case study.

Books and references

[1] R. I. Levin, D. S. Rubin, M. H. Siddiqui, S. Rastogi, Statistics for Management, Pearson.

[2] Anderson, Sweeney et al., Statistics for Business and Economics, Cengage.

Instructor bio

Prof. Sudeep Bapat

IIT Bombay

Prof. Sudeep R. Bapat is an Assistant professor at the Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay. Prior to this, he was a visiting faculty at the University of California Santa Barbara, USA and as an Assistant professor at IIM Indore. He did his Masters in statistics from IIT Bombay in 2012, and PhD in applied statistics from the University of Connecticut, USA, in 2017. He has published over 50 original research articles in reputed journals in the field, and has chaired, organized sessions and given talks in several national and international conferences. His areas of interest include statistical learning, time series, sequential sampling methodologies, change point detection, censoring, statistical finance, among a few others.

Course certificate

The course is free to enroll and learn from. But if you want a certificate, you have to register and write the proctored exam conducted by us in person at any of the designated exam centres.

The exam is optional for a fee of Rs 1000/- (Rupees one thousand only).

Date and Time of Exams: April 19, 2026 Morning session 9am to 12 noon; Afternoon Session 2pm to 5pm.

Registration url: Announcements will be made when the registration form is open for registrations.

The online registration form has to be filled and the certification exam fee needs to be paid. More details will be made available when the exam registration form is published. If there are any changes, it will be mentioned then.

Please check the form for more details on the cities where the exams will be held, the conditions you agree to when you fill the form etc.

CRITERIA TO GET A CERTIFICATE

Average assignment score = 25% of average of best 3 assignments out of the total 4 assignments given in the course.
Exam score = 75% of the proctored certification exam score out of 100

Final score = Average assignment score + Exam score

Please note that assignments encompass all types (including quizzes, programming tasks, and essay submissions) available in the specific week.

YOU WILL BE ELIGIBLE FOR A CERTIFICATE ONLY IF AVERAGE ASSIGNMENT SCORE >=10/25 AND EXAM SCORE >= 30/75. If one of the 2 criteria is not met, you will not get the certificate even if the Final score >= 40/100.

Certificate will have your name, photograph and the score in the final exam with the breakup.It will have the logos of NPTEL and IIT Bombay. It will be e-verifiable at nptel.ac.in/noc.

Only the e-certificate will be made available. Hard copies will not be dispatched.

Once again, thanks for your interest in our online courses and certification. Happy learning.

- NPTEL team

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