Operating Manual

Qualification Standards for General Schedule Positions

Individual Occupational Requirements for

Mathematical Statistics Series, GS-1529

The text below is extracted verbatim from Section IV-B of the Operating Manual for Qualification Standards for General Schedule Positions (p.IV-B-207), but contains minor edits to conform to web-page requirements.

Use these individual occupational requirements in conjunction with the "Group Coverage Qualification Standard for Professional and Scientific Positions."

Basic Requirements:

1. Degree: that included 24 semester hours of mathematics and statistics, of which at least 12 semester hours were in mathematics and 6 semester hours were in statistics.

   OR

2. Combination of education and experience--at least 24 semester hours of mathematics and statistics, including at least 12 hours in mathematics and 6 hours in statistics, as shown in A above, plus appropriate experience or additional education.

Evaluation of Education: Courses acceptable toward meeting the mathematics course requirement of paragraphs A or B above must have included at least four of the following: differential calculus, integral calculus, advanced calculus, theory of equations, vector analysis, advanced algebra, linear algebra, mathematical logic, differential equations, or any other advanced course in mathematics for which one of these was a prerequisite. Courses in mathematical statistics or probability theory with a prerequisite of elementary calculus or more advanced courses will be accepted toward meeting the mathematics requirements, with the provision that the same course cannot be counted toward both the mathematics and the statistics requirement.

Evaluation of Experience: The experience offered in combination with educational courses to meet the requirements in paragraph B above should include evidence of statistical work such as (a) sampling, (b) collecting, computing, and analyzing statistical data, and (c) applying known statistical techniques to data such as measurement of central tendency, dispersion, skewness, sampling error, simple and multiple correlation, analysis of variance, and tests of significance.

Without other indications of statistical experience, work required in the processing of numerical or quantified information by other than statistical methods is not considered appropriate qualifying experience. Examples of such nonqualifying work include statistical clerical work; statistical drafting; calculation of totals, averages, percentages, or other arithmetic summations; preparation of simple tables or charts; or verification of data by simple comparison or proofreading.