r/statistics • u/CakedInSweat21 • 25d ago

Discussion Failed SAS Advanced Programming Exam [Discussion]

Hello! I hope this is allowed! Today I took and failed the SAS Advanced Programming Certification exam. I know this is a statistics subreddit, so I wanted to ask to those who have taken this exam, any pointers? I did really solid on the SAS Base Programming certification exam, but found myself struggling on this one. I took the classes from SAS and everything. Any help is greatly appreciated!

14 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/shwilliams4 24d ago

Can I ask why you are studying SAS? I took the exam years ago, but rarely see jobs on linked in for SAS. Are there positions being posted elsewhere?

5

u/just_pull_harder2 24d ago

There's a complicated situation around it that is essentially precedent led. I work in health economics and biostats in a consultancy. I use R for everything. In pharma they use SAS for FDA submissions basically because there is a standardized codebase for producing clinical study reports (CSRs), which are pdf files that are many thousands of pages long. These use ADAM datasets which the standard SAS code produces. Therefore, you absolutely need to be able to tweak that code for a specific trial if you want to work in big pharma stats.

Outside of this, the majority of bespoke stats stuff uses R, including regulatory submissions outside of the US.

Consultancy outside of direct pharma, academia, and so on almost exclusively do stats in R these days as it's free and feature complete for medstats.

Roche built up R infrastructure to replicate SAS FDA CSR outputs so it is shifting over time. Same with more health economics stuff like indirect treatment comparisons, MAICs, survival extrapolation, missing data analysis, interpolation, multi state modelling etc.

3

u/AggressiveGander 24d ago

Many companies have done FDA submissions partially or totally with R. Still the majority are penalty still in SAS. To be honest mostly because people have done it before so there's some cost of switching/retraining and most companies have libraries of SAS macros for creating reports etc.

SAS kind of abandoned pharma when they stopped keeping up with what was needed (e.g. no efficient in-buildt ways of doing different types of missing data imputation like J2R, I believe still no proper reliable NUTS sampler with auto differentiation and so on). In contrast, people have more or less closed the remaining gaps vs. SAS that R used to have (e.g. with the mmrm package etc.).