Physics Colloquium: "Physicists do social science: the case of GREs"
- Event Type
- Seminar/Symposium
- Sponsor
- Department of Physics
- Date
- Nov 17, 2021 4:00 pm
- Speaker
- Professor Michael Weissman
- Contact
- Marjorie Gamel
- mgamel@illinois.edu
- Phone
- 217-377-3762
- Views
- 140
- Originating Calendar
- Physics - Colloquium
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.