The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right

Re:The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right by stouset on Thursday December 08, 2011 @10:13AM (#3329345)

The school board member claimed that he "managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly"

Perhaps if he wasn't utterly innumerate, he could have realized that 10 out of 60 is one and a half standard deviations worse the expected value of selecting answers by chance. His understanding of math is so bad, he performed worse than he likely would have had he just answered questions randomly.

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Re:The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right by blahedo on Thursday December 08, 2011 @03:23PM (#3330949)

I thought the same thing, but it turns out the test is not all multiple choice---in the 2006 exam, 28 out of 58 problems were open answer, and the rest were 4-option multiple choice. So the expected value of a totally random selection would be 7.5 questions out of 58---meaning this guy was at least not doing worse than chance.

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Re:The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right by transphenomenal on Friday December 09, 2011 @02:20AM (#3332945)

Getting 10 questions right may not be statistically more significant than just answering randomly. I would calculate this myself, but I'm going to bed, however, just eyeballing it makes me think this is quite possible.

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Re:The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right by stouset on Friday December 09, 2011 @11:53AM (#3334418)

Good catch. Thanks.

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