Half the students are below average! This is outrageous!
My mom says I'm above average
I cant tell if this is a joke or if this guy is in the bottom quartile.
It's a satirical account, that's not a real politician.
There are plenty of them out there that are this dumb though.
Its a little sad that it’s this hard to tell anymore. Thanks btw
about a quarter of the population
Looks like a real educational problem.
I cant tell if you are joking or if you are in the bottom quartile.
Haha uhhhh thats funny for all the wrong reasons so I’m gonna upvote you even though you’re trying to insult me
First time I saw a statistician joke
You're probably one of today's lucky 10,000.
The worst thing about that XKCD comic is that I can't get annoyed about seeing it for the thousandth time without risking a recursive loop of comic posting, me getting annoyed, comic posting to explain why I'm wrong to be annoyed, more annoyance... it's a problem, though admittedly not my most pressing one.
News at 11: "Half of people are below average!"
Ashktually half people below the median.
Ackchyually, they never said which average they meant, you just assumed mean.
True, but those who know what "median" means probably also know what a "quartile" means, so if I used "median" it would've made my comment less of an "obvious, duh!" thing and spoil the unstated point I'm making as well as the joke.
Best leave the mathematical incorrectness there to preserve the feeling of obviousness.
Yeah but the average is pretty fucking dumb.
Not in Lake Wobegon!!
Only all the children in Lake Wobegon are above average. It's balanced out by them all turning into idiots when they become adults.
I notice there is a 25% in the top as well... Coincidence or conspiracy...
Everyone should be in the top! Everyone should have unlimited resources from disabled addicts to military bioweapons developers - it should be a flat line, a plateau!
Bioweapon developers should be shot in the street. Disabled addicts should be provided the proper help they need; and the education should be changed so there are less disabled addicts and bioweapon developers alike.
60% of the time, it works every time
I was skeptical of these numbers until I did the research. It's even worse than I thought. Did you know that only 20% of students test in the top quintile? Is our children learning?
I was born extremely smart. I always tested way at the top of the curve... far superior to all my peers.
One could construct tests where this isn't a given. Create an exam with one really easy question and one really hard question. You'll end up with a huge spike in the center and two tiny tails. The top quintile of correct answers (<=1.6 correct answers) will be vanishingly small.
I can almost see a facebook post along the lines of:
One doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to understand how terrible things are, when fully 25% of the population are in the bottom quartile.25%!? That's nothing. Half of people are below average. That's twice of what you quoted!
I'm surprised it's only 25%. These days, I'd figure at least 40% would be in the lowest quartile. Has anyone checked the math on this?
Check the math? What do I look like, a numbertician??
Damn, I was really hoping to find a mathmagician!
THAT'S NUMBERWANG!!@
Let me try.
I've got 4 quarters in a row, and each quarter represents 25% of people. I take the right most quarter and place it on the left-most quarter.
40% is not right, there's 50% in lowest quartile, 25% in the second, 25% in the third and 0% in the top.
I take the right most quarter and place it on the left-most quarter.
they were not ready for these world-class 220-IQ moves
Tide goes in, tide goes out. Can't explain that.
The gravitational pull of the moon.
But you're right, I cannot explain why gravity even exists.
Oh FSS please don't cede a smart introspection to that billowing buffoon
(nice followup though)
Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
My state'a standardized test says kids are "at risk" if they aren't in the top 40% of the test. The top 50% could all be traditional "a-b" students. But because they weren't in the top 80% of a-b students they are at risk for failing academically.... It's so asinine and disheartening. The last half of the year is devoted to this idiotic test. Kids could be learning stuff that will enrich themselves... Instead they are learnig how to take a test better.
But then again, 25 percent of American students are also in the top quartile on standardized tests, so it evens out.
People understand "glass half empty / glass half full", but they can't quite grasp a bell curve
Nice try everyone knows that the soyjack is on one end and the chad is at the other.
Fucking genius.
We need to get kids up to the Lake Woebegone standard!
What's sad is people are taking this seriously because someone believing this at face value as a bad thing isn't entirely farfetched lol
I wonder which quartile they reside in.
Was he being facetious or serious? Because that’s scary if he was being serious.
facetious
uh, I think it's pronounced Febreeze?
An education system that always fails a set number of people, regarless of how well people do, is a bad system, however.
There will always be 25% in the bottom quartile, regardless of how well any students perform.
As Nougat said, this has nothing to do with passing or failing and is just a consequence of measuring performance. If 100 people take a test and the lowest 25 scorers all have a 95 out of 100 points then they are still in the bottom quartile regardless of the fact that every single student passed with flying colors.
Showing a bell curve with no context means nothing.
I’ve been graded on a curve, and I’ve done it myself a couple of times. IMO, it’s usually a sign of a bad class (too much material being crammed in) or a bad teacher (didn’t get the concepts across to the majority of the students).
That said, it’s usually done when it’s needed to prevent a significant portion of the class from failing. I remember a chem exam I took where a 16/100 was a C.
The basic idea is that grades are normally distributed (ie a bell curve) which allows you to find the average grade range and shift the letter grade (eg a C or C+). There’s some professors who take the idea too far and rather than working off of an actual normal distribution try to fit the procedure to a simply skewed distribution or use it to pull down an 85/100 to a C, but in my experience that’s the exception to the rule, especially in math/science courses.
Also, iirc this is a parody account.
I agree. My calc I professor would just silently scribble equations on the board, then turn around, gesture wildly, and shout "You see".
I remember right before the drop date, I had a 34 in the class, and he took time out of class to beg us to study because if too many people failed, he might have consequences.
The only grade left was the final. I did much worse on it than the rest of the course, but my course grade shot up to the low 70s. Sure enough, I had the like 4th highest grade in the class.
Do you statistics? This guy clearly statistics.
Duh!!
