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How Well Do You Estimate?
A random UK blogger has published a quiz asking readers to estimate various numeric values which they may or may not have knowledge of; and has analyzed the resulting answers to determine how well people guess. The first part of the results looks at some specific questions, and the second part takes a look at the quiz overall.
I estimate that at about this point all the jokes about estimating will get tedious
Philip
Signatures are broken
I've never actually read MMM, but...
What really torques me is when you make an estimate early in the program,
and you know it's only an estimate,
and since you have only limited information it's not even a very good estimate,
and you give management all of those caveats up front,
it just doesn't matter.
For the rest of the life of the program, better estimates using more information, and even the reality of program execution will all be force-fit back into that original SWAG.
But sometimes even that original SWAG didn't matter, because it might well have been force-fit into some manager's wish-list.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
You must not have gone to college then. :)
Yes, you need at least specific average to *graduate*, but then you don't have any assurance of doing so. My wife teaches at a college and I can assure you that there are many D's and F's given out. However, unlike highschool and social promotion thereof, those people either shape up (and retake the class) or ship out (dropping out). Many do the latter (thus "x years college" being an popular answer to last grade completed).
Graduate school is a bit different, since you need a B (3.0) average to remain in it. C's are suspension and lower is removal from the program.
I think the grades represent how some hypothetical "average" community would fair. If you are in college, you *should* fair better than the community, and if you are in graduate school you *should* fair far better than the community. Those who don't shouldn't be at that level.
Sig under construction since 1998.
I'm not sure what school you went to, but 3.0 was a B at Penn State.
A: 4.0
A-: 3.67
B+: 3.33
B: 3.0
B-: 2.67
C+: 2.33
C: 2.0
etc.
I think you had it in your first statement. The chances of getting a +5 greatly decrease with relation to the age of the discussion.
+3 and +4s can be had, but they generally tend to be later posts to a discussion.
Moderation is not a runaway process than it is a positive feedback loop in relation to time and mod points.
Did you know that there are no "below average" college graduates? Proof: In order to graduate from college you must have a GPA equating to a C or better.
That is because grades should be a reflection of a student's mastery of the material, not how a student relates to their peers. There are classes where 70% is an A, not to get more students with A's but because that is the expected level of understanding. In fact, that class had less A's than most others with the typical 90% scale.
Ask an American and a Japanese if they are "good in math". The Japanese will typically say "no", the American will say "yes".
Most Americans feel they are not good at math and ungood at egnlish.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
A fine quiz, but I hope he throws out his non-UK results by IP before he uses the data. For many of those topics, my poor American brain had no basis for an estimate and knew it.
The data could be improved by adding the a "no-confidence" checkbox to each question in addition to demanding a numeric answer. With this, he could compare whether people's estimates were better or worse where they thought they knew the answer. This would make a nice complement to measuring raw estimating power.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)