Physics Colloquium: "Physicists do social science: the case of GREs"
Speaker: |
(sign-up)
Professor Michael Weissman |
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Date: | 11/17/2021 |
Time: | 4 p.m. |
Event Contact: | Marjorie Gamel 217-377-3762 mgamel@illinois.edu |
Sponsor: | Department of Physics |
Event Type: | Seminar/Symposium |
To set educational policy, physicists have to do some social science. Here I look at the most publicized paper on the most prominent current issue: the use of GREs in admission. The paper makes numerous elementary statistics errors: variance inflation by unnecessary collinearity and by unnecessary stratification, collider stratification bias, bias from improper imputation of missing data, conflating failure to reject a null with confirmation of the null, eccentric use of subsamples, invention of a new way to inflate error bars by an order of magnitude, and omission of needed data. The sign of each error tends to support the authors' prior hypothesis. I draw two morals: we need stats education and we need to recommit to scientific honesty. |