SPSS through your University

[psychwanabe]

Does anyone know how to go about inquiring or petitioning for graduate students to be able to get SPSS through the University license?

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[Ollie123]

This is something that is obviously very university specific. Honestly, I'm shocked you can't. I've never heard of a university not offering SPSS to grad students. I think most even offer it to undergrads. You usually have to pay for it, buts its nominal (10-100$, and I still consider $100 nominal compared to the 1500 or whatever it costs if you buy it on your own). Best point of contact would probably be your advisor, they can probably direct you to who in the administration you'd need to talk to about setting something up in the budget for this.

 

[psychwanabe]

Well, it was the stats prof who said "I have no clue...they don't even give me one!" He suggested going through APAGS reps. I was hoping someone here had done it before.

 

[paramour]

At my last program, I *think* that we were told that we'd have to take it up w/ the IT department (but it's been a few years, so I may be wrong). However, I was also advised that it was unlikely they would agree to it, since they had actually revoked students' ability to obtain SAS/SPSS (and a few other things) through the university license within the past few years. So, basically students were able to get it once upon a time, and then the powers that be decided it cost too much to maintain and/or it was too much administrative hassle, and yanked it from everyone.

 

[irish80122]

We get it on our office computers but for personal use our only option is the Grad Pack. I have a wonderful advisor who purchased me SAS though, which is fantastic...if I could just figure out how it works.

 

[Ollie123]

I was wrestling with SAS last night. Its nice in that its more powerful than SPSS (in the software sense, not in the statistical sense). Its also very very poorly made. Like, embarassingly so. We use it for classes here, and while the average assignment only takes me a couple minutes to write the syntax for, last night I spent 2 hours trying to get the output to show up in a reasonable format. Its finicky about a lot of things that don't stem from difficult syntax, but just overall poor programming.

I'm a comp sci nerd though, so maybe I'm just more picky about things like that than most people

 

[psychwanabe]

Well I'll probably ask the APAGS rep to bring it up at the next meeting, and maybe ask the Dept. secretary about another avenue. I bought the student version, but as so many said, it's already too limited for what I need.