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Physics Colloquium: "Physicists do social science: the case of GREs"

Speaker: Professor Michael Weissman
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.