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One night on his way to work, some woman ran a red light and crashed into his door. It almost stopped production of a piece of...
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snip Yes, I'm generalizing from one of my own experiences, and you're right that I did get better, as time went...
Right. What they all have in common is that they require someone to map what I think is not entirely linear onto a linear scale.
In making admissions decisions, is the student with a 4.0 GPA but poor GRE scores more or less qualified than the student with a 3.2 GAP and maximal ("perfect") GRE scores? You can come up with some kind of formula that reduces these two numbers (and other factors, such as letters of recommendation) to a single number and use that, and sometimes that's what has to be done, but my position is that to some extent it's arbitrary.
Sure. I could do what I guess is the academic equivalent -- correct and complete and on time gets full credit, and everything else gets zero Credit Debt -- but I don't want to.
Of course it is, if all the buttignments are equally weighted. N + N + N + N + 0 5N is 80%, isn't it?
You are not doing those adults a favor. The zero should be an incomplete, unfullfilled, NAN, or something. These people are supposed to be getting prepared for the real working world. There is no zero...
My point is that to some extent the 80% number is arbitrary. The university requires me to buttign a letter grade (or pbutt-fail) to every student, so I have to do this sort of thing, but it seems to me that I'm deluding myself if I think it means more than a best guess about the students' performance.
In a real course, odds are that some of those buttignments would actually be exams, and the weighting of the individual buttignments is also to some extent arbitrary.
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I would have thought it was obvious that "unbiased" means "making decisions based on relevant criteria such as competence rather than irrelevant ones such as hair color 1", but maybe it's one of those words that has been so abused by people on various sides of various debates that it is no longer useful.
1 Though there might be jobs in which hair color *was* a relevant criterion.
I guess the risk that a person in this category will want to take significant time off (for maternity leave, I'm guessing) would outweigh whatever other qualifications she might possess? I'm fairly sure that there are some people in this category who don't intend to do that, and are doing everything they can to avoid it. Too bad you can't legally (in the US, AFAIK) ask questions that might let you winnow them out from the ones who *would* abuse the system, so to speak.
snip That wasn't my intent when I wrote the paragraph beginning "Excellent" above -- my intent was to say that while *you* might be basing your buttessments only on competence...
I can only buttume that what you're getting at here is that I argue with you, and I wouldn't argue with a man making the same claims. Could be. It's not a conscious bias, but it's possible. Or it could be that you seem more willing to pursue these off-topic(?) topics than the males in the group. Or maybe you're talking about something
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-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.