My university has decided that it should give a core (that is compulsory) statistics class to its computer science undergraduates.  This opens the interesting question of what should be in such a class that everyone has to take.As far as I know most CS degrees don't currently contain statistics classes so it's hard to compare to what already exists.Does anyone have any experience of this and what would people  recommend for a new statistics class for computer science students?
What statistics should be in a computer science degree?
curriculum design;undergraduate
My first thought to provide a bit of something for you to go on was CS2013: The ACM/IEEE Joint Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Computer Science. This is available at https://www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final-report.pdf. I've copied out two relevant passages from that here:Computer science curricula should be designed to provide students with the flexibility to work across many disciplines. Computing is a broad field that connects to and draws from many disciplines, including mathematics, electrical engineering, psychology, statistics, fine arts, linguistics, and physical and life sciences. Computer Science students should develop the flexibility to work across disciplines. (p.20)Similarly, while we do note a growing trend in the use of probability and statistics in computing (reflected by the increased number of core hours on these topics in the Body of Knowledge) and believe that this trend is likely to continue in the future, we still believe it is not necessary for all CS programs to require a full course in probability theory for all majors. (p.50). It is worth searching that document for 'statistics'. It is mentioned in many other areas, but mostly as something learned in other areas such as Networks, HCI, Cryptography, etc.The December 2013 issue of ACM Inroads had a good article (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2537777) on the role of mathematics in CS. This included a section on The Current State of Mathematics in Computer Science Curricula. The article states that The most-connected mathematical topic [to CS] by far is probability and statistics and has some references to such. They also present the mathematics requirements of 25 'high quality' CS programs. Stats and Prob was required for 15, Calculus for 21 and Discrete Mathematics for 22.http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1240202 discusses statistics in liberal arts CS curricula. Searching the CITIDEL syllabus collection (citidel.villanova.edu/ then look for syllabus collection) for 'statistics' might be worth a try, although the website has been varying between unresponsive to slow to responsive lately. Also, some of the material in there is a bit dated, but then again, statistics dates fairly well! Given that in 2013 60% of sampled 'high quality' CS programmes had statistics, maybe it is more prevalent than you think. Perhaps the best way to obtain the most up to date information is to check the websites of several good CS programmes and hope that if they include statistics, the syllabi are available online. 