"John Knight" <johnknight at usa.com> wrote:
>"Bob LeChevalier" <lojbab at lojban.org> wrote in message
>news:f3bcju8u4kmc3k3engod0496aqc835q0ku at 4ax.com...>> I see no reason to deny I said it. I believe it is true. People are
>> incapable of behaving truly randomly. More likely, if someone were to have
>> no idea what the answers were, but wanted to guess, they would mark the
>> answers NON-randomly, like marking "A" for all of them or repeating a
>> pattern.
>>>I don't blame you for trying to retreat from your stupid remark, so let me
>repeat it for you:
>>"This makes the assumption that those who know nothing guess randomly. IN
>reality, we don't know that people guess randomly when faced with a test
>question they do not understand. Indeed, we know that they do not."
>>Note that you said "we KNOW that they do not" guess randomly.
>>"WE" "know" no such thing. "WE" know that when students are confronted with
>a question which they don't have even a clue about, and they STILL answer
>that question, that the only thing they could possibly do is "guess
>randomly",
As I noted, they could also answer "A" to all such problems, which is NOT
"answering randomly".
You even invoked your parody of "womens intuition", which described a
NON-RANDOM way of getting the answer.
>> >You don't seem to understand the point either. If *all* students just
>> >*guessed* on a four part multiple choice question, and didn't have a clue
>> >about what the answer was, they would have gotten 25% of them correct just
>> >by chance.
>>>> But the converse is NOT true, that "if just 25% of them got the question
>> correct, then all students just guessed".
>>What kind of a freak are you? It IS true.
No it is not.
>It's a basic FACT of probability and statistics
False. And you will never find a book on probability that says it is a fact.
>that if you have a four choice answer, and exactly 25% of
>students select the correct answer, that this could be nothing BUT a random
>selection.
ROTFLMAO
You simply do not understand how silly that remark is!
>This is particularly true when all four of the answers are as close to 25%
>as they were.
>>If 26% selected the correct answer, then 74% got the WRONG answer, and the
>obvious scenario when there is such a low correct response rate is that
>students GUESSED.
False. It is NOT obvious, and even when the split was even for all 4
answers, if this is true for only one problem among many, then it is not even
LIKELY.
>This is too close to the standard error to be significant, though.
You have no idea what the standard error is. You cited the standard error on
the overall American score (actually the 95% confidence level which is twice
the standard error), apparently thinking it applies to every number presented
in the book about Americans.
>If 30% got it right, then 70% got it wrong, and it's very rare that 70% of
>students would have been taught the wrong thing.
On the contrary, we know that many times in history, large numbers of people
have been taught the wrong thing.
>Certainly it happens, but
>if the answers are spread evenly across the other options, then it's
>inevitable that many of them just RANDOMLY guessed.
It is NOT "inevitable"that they "guessed", but even if they guessed, there is
no reason to believe that they managed to guess RANDOMLY, which is somewhat
difficult.
>> A slight dawn of understanding. Of course when they "select the wrong answer
>> on purpose", they don't think it is the wrong answer.
>>No, there was no dawn here. There would have been a dawn if you'd realized
>that American girls literally cannot score lower than if they'd just guessed
>on a THIRD of the problems unless they knew enough about the subject to
>subconsciously select the wrong answer (unless they were taught wrong in the
>first place, which is silly, because they were taught in the same classroom
>as boys who didn't do this).
In which case, you are admitting that THEY DID NOT GUESS RANDOMLY.
"Subconsciously selecting" is not "RANDOM selecting".
>> You cannot determine the percentage who guessed. You persist in assuming
>> that everyone who got the answer wrong guessed randomly, and there is no
>> evidence of this.
>>Lookit, if they scored *exactly* the same as if they'd just guessed, then
>ALL you have is proof that this is what they did.
No it isn't. You are committing a logical fallacy.
Which is not surprising, since you have proven incapable of logic multiple
times.
>If they scored significantly higher than the 3% standard error
There is no 3% standard error involved here. The standard error on the
American overall score was somewhat less than 1 1/2%, and you have
misattributed the statement that the 95% confidence level is double the
standard error, to thinking that the standard error is twice what it is, and
then gone one to apply that false "standard error" to every number reported.
> added onto the 25% they'd
>get just for guessing [read: significantly higher than 28%], only then do
>you have evidence that more than guessing was involved. If they scored 50%,
>and the other 50% answered ONE of the wrong questions, then you may have
>evidence that they didn't guess, but actually misunderstood the problem, or
>were not taught properly. But if that 50% is spread evenly over the other
>three answers, then you have statistical evidence that 50% of them GUESSED.
Completely wrong. Go back to school.
>> They did NOT score "that low, consistently"
>>>>Count the questions. Tell me what percentage of them scored lower than if
>they'd just guessed
"Consistently" means ALL THE TIME.
>> But they did not do so on all problems or even most, and indeed boys scored
>> low on nearly as many questions as girls.
>>Boys scored lower on exactly 2% of the questions. Girls scored lower than
>boys on more than 90% of them.
That is not what I stated, even if your count is correct (which I doubt).
Boy scored lower than the guessing percentage almost as many times as girls
did.
>> As she said, liars figure.
>>The part that's always missing from that is "idiots can't detect when liars
>are figuring".
But we aren't idiots, so we can detect that you, a liar, are figuring, rather
than thinking.
>You are real wierd. This was an EXACT quote of what you wrote, and I
>predicted that you'd eventually deny you said it, but here you are denying
>it the NEXT day.
I did not deny saying it. You simply have so little reading comprehension
that you did not understand my words, even though others did. You clearly
STILL do not understand my words, and now you persist in telling me that I
think something differently than what I said.
>Where in the world do you get the idea that a random number generator is
>required for "any person" or *people* to make random choices?
Unlike you, I know the definition of "random" when applied to questions of
probability and statistics.
>People and persons and a person make random choices all the time,
No they don't. When they want a random choice, they flip a coin or roll a
die, or shuffle and draw a card, which are forms of random number generators,
provided that they haven't been "fixed".
lojbab
