DSMA Admission study guide
DSMA Admission · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The DSMA Admission exam is the entry assessment for a data science and analytics master's-style program, and it is designed to check whether you have the quantitative and computational foundation to start graduate-level coursework. It suits candidates coming from statistics, computer science, economics, engineering, or a working analytics role who can already read code and reason about data. The DSMA Admission study guide has 6 sections and about 2,073 words.
01Data Governance and Ethics
Data governance and ethics covers the decision rights, controls, and justifications that surround data before any model is built. The exam tests whether you can name the accountable roles, distinguish privacy techniques by the guarantee each one actually gives, and reason from principle to a defensible decision rather than reciting slogans.
383 words, about 2 min02Statistics and Probability
This domain tests reasoning under uncertainty: translating a story into a probability model, choosing an estimator or test, and reading the result without overclaiming. Kolmogorov axioms; P(A union B) = P(A) + P(B) - P(A intersect B); independence means P(A intersect B) = P(A)P(B).
334 words, about 2 min03Data Management and SQL
This domain tests the relational model and the ability to write a query whose result set is exactly what the question asks for, including NULL behaviour and join cardinality. Primary and foreign keys enforce entity and referential integrity.
344 words, about 2 min04Programming and Data Manipulation
This domain tests whether you can transform data reproducibly and detect the silent bugs that leave row counts or dtypes wrong without raising an error. A pandas DataFrame has labelled columns and an index.
324 words, about 2 min05Machine Learning Fundamentals
This domain tests the discipline around a model: honest evaluation, the right metric for the problem, and knowing why a method fails. Split into train, validation, and test; cross-validate on the training portion only and touch the test set once.
325 words, about 2 min06Data Visualization and Communication
This domain tests whether you can choose an encoding that people read accurately, design a chart that survives scrutiny, and state a finding an audience can act on. Perceptual accuracy, following Cleveland and McGill, ranks position on a common scale above length, then angle and slope, then area, then colour hue and saturation.
363 words, about 2 min