and the professor too based on his own confusion

Similar vibe

Oh, statistics is a completely different beast. From the kind that will actually attack you, differently from the ones the OP is afraid of.

It's the mathematical study of groups of three gnomes.

BRUH

In our school in Germany there was an observation: students who do well in math usually have somewhat worse grades in statistics. While students who were bad at math often did better in statistics.

In grade 12 and 13 it went like algebra, statistics, geometry, geometry (per semester). Basically, you either got A B+ A A, or D B- D D.

Writing this down I realize they should absolutely make a statistical analysis on these results.

It was the same for me, both in school and when studying CS. It's almost as if the difficulty of learning topics is different for everyone.