andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-93 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: After reading the Rewarding Strivers book , I had some thoughts about how to make the college admissions system more fair to students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. Instead of boosting up the disadvantaged students, why not pull down the advantaged students? Here’s the idea. Disadvantaged students are defined typically not by a bad thing that they have, but rather by good things that they don’t have: financial resources, a high-quality education, and so forth. In contrast, advantaged students get all sorts of freebies. So here are my suggestions: 1. All high school grades on a 4-point scale (A=4, B=3, etc). No more of this 5-points-for-an-A-in-an-AP course, which gives the ridiculous outcomes of kids graduating with a 4.3 average, not so fair to kids in schools that don’t offer a lot of AP classes. 2. Subtract points for taking the SAT multiple times. A simple rule would be: You can use your highest SAT score, but you lose 50 points for every other time
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1 After reading the Rewarding Strivers book , I had some thoughts about how to make the college admissions system more fair to students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. [sent-1, score-0.496]
2 Instead of boosting up the disadvantaged students, why not pull down the advantaged students? [sent-2, score-0.486]
3 In contrast, advantaged students get all sorts of freebies. [sent-5, score-0.397]
4 All high school grades on a 4-point scale (A=4, B=3, etc). [sent-7, score-0.294]
5 No more of this 5-points-for-an-A-in-an-AP course, which gives the ridiculous outcomes of kids graduating with a 4. [sent-8, score-0.279]
6 3 average, not so fair to kids in schools that don’t offer a lot of AP classes. [sent-9, score-0.402]
7 Subtract points for taking the SAT multiple times. [sent-11, score-0.323]
8 A simple rule would be: You can use your highest SAT score, but you lose 50 points for every other time you took the test. [sent-12, score-0.517]
9 (I seem to recall that there is a policy where you are allowed an option to take as long as you want on the test. [sent-16, score-0.249]
10 This is fine, but then you should lose points to be fair to the other students–many of whom have economic and social disadvantages–who didn’t take the extra time. [sent-17, score-0.518]
11 Subtract points for taking a commercial coaching program such as Kaplan, Princeton Review, etc. [sent-19, score-0.523]
12 But many disadvantaged kids don’t have the option to take these. [sent-21, score-0.618]
13 Require students to declare if they’ve taken such a course and subtract 50 points on the SAT for each such course taken. [sent-22, score-1.05]
14 ) Sure, students could lie on the form, but this would be on a permanent record, sent to both the college and the high school, and there’d be a real risk of getting caught and thrown out of school if you lie on this one. [sent-25, score-0.905]
15 Perhaps 20 points for every year of private high school and 10 points for every year of private elementary school. [sent-28, score-1.509]
16 Or even something trickier such as 1 point for every thousand dollars spent on private school in the kid’s lifetime. [sent-29, score-0.645]
17 I wonder if religious schools would complain about this one, something about religious discrimination. [sent-30, score-0.332]
18 Subtract points if your school (public or private) has its own SAT preparation program. [sent-33, score-0.518]
19 These aren’t really supposed to be so effective (recall chapter 5 of BDA), so maybe just knock off 10 points for this one. [sent-34, score-0.301]
20 As a parent with school-age kids, you can’t retrospectively decide not to be white, or college educated, or whatever, but you can decide to send your children to public school, to not enroll them in a coaching program, and to only take the SAT once. [sent-39, score-0.686]
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Introduction: After reading the Rewarding Strivers book , I had some thoughts about how to make the college admissions system more fair to students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. Instead of boosting up the disadvantaged students, why not pull down the advantaged students? Here’s the idea. Disadvantaged students are defined typically not by a bad thing that they have, but rather by good things that they don’t have: financial resources, a high-quality education, and so forth. In contrast, advantaged students get all sorts of freebies. So here are my suggestions: 1. All high school grades on a 4-point scale (A=4, B=3, etc). No more of this 5-points-for-an-A-in-an-AP course, which gives the ridiculous outcomes of kids graduating with a 4.3 average, not so fair to kids in schools that don’t offer a lot of AP classes. 2. Subtract points for taking the SAT multiple times. A simple rule would be: You can use your highest SAT score, but you lose 50 points for every other time
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Introduction: Several years ago, I heard about a project at the Educational Testing Service to identify “strivers”: students from disadvantaged backgrounds who did unexpectedly well on the SAT (the college admissions exam formerly known as the “Scholastic Aptitude Test” but apparently now just “the SAT,” in the same way that Exxon is just “Exxon” and that Harry Truman’s middle name is just “S”), at least 200 points above a predicted score based on demographic and neighborhood information. My ETS colleague and I agreed that this was a silly idea: From a statistical point of view, if student A is expected ahead of time to do better than student B, and then they get identical test scores, then you’d expect student A (the non-”striver”) to do better than student B (the “striver”) later on. Just basic statistics: if a student does much better than expected, then probably some of that improvement is noise. The idea of identifying these “strivers” seemed misguided and not the best use of the SAT.
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Introduction: I received a bunch of interesting comments on my blog on adjusting SAT scores. Below I have a long comment from a colleague with experience in the field. But first, this hilarious (from a statistical perspective) story from Howard Wainer: Some years ago when we were visiting Harvard [as a parent of a potential student, not in Howard's role as educational researcher], an admissions director said two things of relevance (i) the SAT hasn’t got enough ‘top’ for Harvard — it doesn’t discriminate well enough at the high end. To prove this she said (ii) that Harvard had more than 1500 ‘perfect 1600s’ apply. Some were rejected. I mentioned that there were only about 750 1600s from HS seniors in the US — about 400 had 1600 in their junior year (and obviously didn’t retake) and about 350 from their senior year. So, I concluded, she must be mistaken. Then I found out that they allowed applicants to pick and choose their highest SAT-V score and their highest SAT-M score from separate adm
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Introduction: 20. Explain in two sentences why we expect survey respondents to be honest about vote preferences but possibly dishonest about reporting unhealty behaviors. Solution to question 19 From yesterday : 19. A survey is taken of students in a metropolitan area. At the first stage a school is sampled at random. The schools are divided into two strata: 20 private schools and 50 public schools are sampled. At the second stage, 5 classes are sampled within each sampled school. At the third stage, 10 students are sampled within each class. What is the probability that any given student is sampled? Express this in terms of the number of students in the class, number of classes in the school, and number of schools in the area. Define appropriate notation as needed. Solution: Probability a student is sampled is A*B*C, where A = 20/(# private schools) if the student is at a private school, or 50/(# public schools) if the student is at a public school, B = 5/(# classes in the student
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Introduction: Sharon Otterman reports : When report card grades were released in the fall for the city’s 455 high schools, the highest score went to a small school in a down-and-out section of the Bronx . . . A stunning 94 percent of its seniors graduated, more than 30 points above the citywide average. . . . “When I interviewed for the school,” said Sam Buchbinder, a history teacher, “it was made very clear: this is a school that doesn’t believe in anyone failing.” That statement was not just an exhortation to excellence. It was school policy. By order of the principal, codified in the school’s teacher handbook, all teachers should grade their classes in the same way: 30 percent of students should earn a grade in the A range, 40 percent B’s, 25 percent C’s, and no more than 5 percent D’s. As long as they show up, they should not fail. Hey, that sounds like Harvard and Columbia^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H various selective northeastern colleges I’ve known. Of course, we^H^H
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Introduction: After reading the Rewarding Strivers book , I had some thoughts about how to make the college admissions system more fair to students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. Instead of boosting up the disadvantaged students, why not pull down the advantaged students? Here’s the idea. Disadvantaged students are defined typically not by a bad thing that they have, but rather by good things that they don’t have: financial resources, a high-quality education, and so forth. In contrast, advantaged students get all sorts of freebies. So here are my suggestions: 1. All high school grades on a 4-point scale (A=4, B=3, etc). No more of this 5-points-for-an-A-in-an-AP course, which gives the ridiculous outcomes of kids graduating with a 4.3 average, not so fair to kids in schools that don’t offer a lot of AP classes. 2. Subtract points for taking the SAT multiple times. A simple rule would be: You can use your highest SAT score, but you lose 50 points for every other time
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Introduction: Mark Palko points to a news article by Michael Winerip on teacher assessment: No one at the Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies works harder than Stacey Isaacson, a seventh-grade English and social studies teacher. She is out the door of her Queens home by 6:15 a.m., takes the E train into Manhattan and is standing out front when the school doors are unlocked, at 7. Nights, she leaves her classroom at 5:30. . . . Her principal, Megan Adams, has given her terrific reviews during the two and a half years Ms. Isaacson has been a teacher. . . . The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3′s or 4′s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to . . . the city’s most competitive high schools. . . . You would think the Department of Education would want to r
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Introduction: Sharon Otterman reports : When report card grades were released in the fall for the city’s 455 high schools, the highest score went to a small school in a down-and-out section of the Bronx . . . A stunning 94 percent of its seniors graduated, more than 30 points above the citywide average. . . . “When I interviewed for the school,” said Sam Buchbinder, a history teacher, “it was made very clear: this is a school that doesn’t believe in anyone failing.” That statement was not just an exhortation to excellence. It was school policy. By order of the principal, codified in the school’s teacher handbook, all teachers should grade their classes in the same way: 30 percent of students should earn a grade in the A range, 40 percent B’s, 25 percent C’s, and no more than 5 percent D’s. As long as they show up, they should not fail. Hey, that sounds like Harvard and Columbia^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H various selective northeastern colleges I’ve known. Of course, we^H^H
Introduction: Howard Wainer writes : When we focus only on the differences between groups, we too easily lose track of the big picture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the current public discussions of the size of the gap in test scores that is observed between racial groups. It has been noted that in New Jersey the gap between the average scores of white and black students on the well-developed scale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has shrunk by only about 25 percent over the past two decades. The conclusion drawn was that even though the change is in the right direction, it is far too slow. But focusing on the difference blinds us to what has been a remarkable success in education over the past 20 years. Although the direction and size of student improvements are considered across many subject areas and many age groups, I will describe just one — 4th grade mathematics. . . . there have been steep gains for both racial groups over this period (somewhat steeper g
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Introduction: There’s been some discussion lately about grade inflation. Here’s a graph from Stuart Rojstaczer ( link from Nathan Yau): Rojstaczer writes: In the 1930s, the average GPA at American colleges and universities was about 2.35, a number that corresponds with data compiled by W. Perry in 1943. By the 1950s, the average GPA was about 2.52. GPAs took off in the 1960s with grades at private schools rising faster than public schools, lulled in the 1970s, and began to rise again in the 1980s at a rate of about 0.10 to 0.15 increase in GPA per decade. The grade inflation that began in the 1980s has yet to end. . . . These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. People have discussed why the grades have been going up and whether this is a bad thing. I have a slightly different take on all this. As a t
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Introduction: The most perfect pairing of author and subject since Nicholson Baker and John Updike. Here’s Wolfram on the great researcher of fractals : In his way, Mandelbrot paid me some great compliments. When I was in my 20s, and he in his 60s, he would ask about my scientific work: “How can so many people take someone so young so seriously?” In 2002, my book “A New Kind of Science”—in which I argued that many phenomena across science are the complex results of relatively simple, program-like rules—appeared. Mandelbrot seemed to see it as a direct threat, once declaring that “Wolfram’s ‘science’ is not new except when it is clearly wrong; it deserves to be completely disregarded.” In private, though, several mutual friends told me, he fretted that in the long view of history it would overwhelm his work. In retrospect, I don’t think Mandelbrot had much to worry about on this account. The link from the above review came from Peter Woit, who also points to a review by Brian Hayes wit
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Introduction: Duncan Watts writes: The Human Social Dynamics Group in Yahoo Research is seeking highly qualified candidates for a post-doctoral research scientist position. The Human and Social Dynamics group is devoted to understanding the interplay between individual-level behavior (e.g. how people make decisions about what music they like, which dates to go on, or which groups to join) and the social environment in which individual behavior necessarily plays itself out. In particular, we are interested in: * Structure and evolution of social groups and networks * Decision making, social influence, diffusion, and collective decisions * Networking and collaborative problem solving. The intrinsically multi-disciplinary and cross-cutting nature of the subject demands an eclectic range of researchers, both in terms of domain-expertise (e.g. decision sciences, social psychology, sociology) and technical skills (e.g. statistical analysis, mathematical modeling, computer simulations, design o
Introduction: Here’s some psychology research that’s relevant to yesterday’s discussion on working-class voting. In a paper to appear in the journal Cognitive Science , Andrei Cimpian, Amanda Brandone, and Susan Gelman write: Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than
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Introduction: Denis Cote sends the following , under the heading, “Some bad graphs for your enjoyment”: To start with, they don’t know how to spell “color.” Seriously, though, the graph is a mess. The circular display implies a circular or periodic structure that isn’t actually in the data, the cramped display requires the use of an otherwise-unnecessary color code that makes it difficult to find or make sense of the information, the alphabetical ordering (without even supplying state names, only abbreviations) makes it further difficult to find any patterns. It would be so much better, and even easier, to just display a set of small maps shading states on whether they have different laws. But that’s part of the problem—the clearer graph would also be easier to make! To get a distinctive graph, there needs to be some degree of difficulty. The designers continue with these monstrosities: Here they decide to display only 5 states at a time so that it’s really hard to see any big pi
Introduction: One thing we do here at the Applied Statistics Center is hold mini-conferences. The next one looks really cool. It’s organized by Sharad Goel and Jake Hofman (Microsoft Research, formerly at Yahoo Research), David Park (Columbia University), and Sergei Vassilvitskii (Google). As with our other conferences, one of our goals is to mix the academic and nonacademic research communities. Here’s the website for the workshop, and here’s the announcement from the organizers: With an explosion of data on every aspect of our everyday existence — from what we buy, to where we travel, to who we know — we are able to observe human behavior with granularity largely thought impossible just a decade ago. The growth of such online activity has further facilitated the design of web-based experiments, enhancing both the scale and efficiency of traditional methods. Together these advances have created an unprecedented opportunity to address longstanding questions in the social sciences, rang
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