Statistical Literacy
by Denise Harvey and David M. Lane
Prerequisites
• Chapter 1: Levels of Measurement
The Board of Trustees at a university commissioned a top management-consulting firm to address the admission processes for academic and athletic programs. The consulting firm wrote a report discussing the trade-off between maintaining academic and athletic excellence. One of their key findings was:
The standard for an athlete’s admission, as reflected in SAT scores alone, is lower than the standard for non-athletes by as much as 20 percent, with the weight of this difference being carried by the so-called “revenue sports” of football and basketball. Athletes are also admitted through a different process than the one used to admit non-athlete students.
What do you think?
Based on what you have learned in this chapter about measurement scales, does it make sense to compare SAT scores using percentages? Why or why not?
Think about this before continuing:
As you may know, the SAT has an arbitrarily-determined lower limit on test scores of 200. Therefore, SAT is measured on either an ordinal scale or, at most, an interval scale. However, it is clearly not measured on a ratio scale. Therefore, it is not meaningful to report SAT score differences in terms of percentages. For example, consider the effect of subtracting 200 from every student's score so that the lowest possible score is 0. How would that affect the difference as expressed in percentages?
