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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

Tests and homework aren't written for someone who is just going in cold, you're supposed to take the class and read the material.

Since there's no way to judge the required sample size based on the information, it's extremely likely that option A was something specifically discussed.

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That might make sense in a different case, but the actual question doesn't have enough context to answer it.

"What is the best plan of action for the university?"

"Best" meaning what?

It is a ridiculous and intellectually embarrassing question. I just picture what someone like Feynman would think of a question like this.

I wouldn't be shocked this is a higher order effect of too much of certain 20th century French philosophers. We can't even make test questions that aren't bullshit.

There literally should be a none of the above choice because of lack of information in the question.

It's a homework question not a test question

The philosophical part might be the point

Philosophy of X is how we talk about X, the terminology and the state of our understanding. Philosophy is a huge part of learning, but we usually don't call it philosophy.

That would make sense if there was a freeform "why did you give this answer" section. As a multiple-choice question, there's nothing you can infer about the answer.

Or maybe it was a control question and the teacher is going to treat the spread of results as their own little survey...

Eh. As someone who has been involved with survey work--both giving and receiving--standard practice in this situation would probably be A and it wouldn't shock me if it had been covered in class. D is not wrong and might be the right answer if, e.g., emailing out a survey to a broader mailing list of people who don't have a close affiliation with you--i.e. you don't want to pester a general population. However, A is pretty much what is done for employee satisfaction surveys and things of that type.

Is it a test on the trivia of typical survey conduct or a question to probe understanding of statistics? If its a trivia question then ask it like "What is the most likely way a survey would followup in the event of ...".

I think Feynman would be pleased with question. He was well grounded in the real world of doing science with incomplete datasets. For researchers who gather data with surveys, this is a frequently encountered problem, so it is legitimate to discuss it an statistics course.

If there is a problem, it is the multiple choice format. This issue of handling incomplete datasets would be make a good essay question.

That said, it is perfectly reasonable to choose D and work with the information you have. That is what real world clinic studies do when they report the number of people who dropped out of a study.

It is also reasonable to choose A and attempt to get better coverage. That is what real world election pollsters do.

But this obviously isn't a math class, which is the point. I think this post should be read in the context of "make students take statistics instead of calculus", then students will get questions like this instead of studying a topic with clear and unambiguous questions.

In what way is a statistics class not a math class?

There is math statistics and non-math statistics. This question is a non-math statistics question.

It's essentially a mechanics of conducting surveys question.

But how does that speak to the nature of the entire class?

calculus is full of ambiguity. Not in a mathematical sense, but as someone who has recently TA'd a calculus class, I can confidently assert that no mathematics happens there. Mathematics is only unambiguous insofar as you can check your own work. None of those students would have been capable of that. They're just memorizing rules with many unintuitive caveats that are unintuitive either out of an absurd desire to restrict the curriculum, or because they are natural in the context of their proofs, but students are basically forbidden from seeing those.

Universities have decided that making calculus as capricious as possible serves their interests of having a weeder class.

Questions like this, where you must have attended the class to know the answer, are often introduced to penalise no-shows. It can also expose suspected contract cheating in online exams.

However, it is quite risky, since it probably wouldn’t stand in court, e.g. when a failed student sues the school.

This is the kind of thing that is obvious for people who are good test takers. When you know the context of the question, then you know exactly what answer the instructor is looking for.

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