Saturday, May 19, 2007
Elitism Survey -vvw

The Straits Times has an article about views on elitism in schools in today's Insight section on page 11 of Saturday. There is quite a bit of statistical data gathered from ST's survey. But here's the funny part, under the tables and charts, there is a line of small text that states:

A difference of at least 8 per cent between elite and non-elite responses is needed to conclude that the differences in attitudes are significant.

Going back to the tables, it seems that only a few items show a difference of above 8%. In other words, the attitudes of the students from both elite and non-elite schools are essentially the same for all the other questions. Yet ST managed to conclude that students from elite schools are more likely to be worried about being left out of the elite groups. This wasn't even one of the questions in the charts shown!

Let's recap what we've got. We have a survey of a small and bias sample pool (bias because part of survey responses come from students who bothered to reply to ST's email) that shows us nothing much. Then we have a full page article telling us that students in elite schools are so stressed about not being able to join the elite clique. I don't know about you but something doesn't smell right to me.

-- permalink --
Yiheng made 11:26 AM

3 Comments:

Not the first time ST published some kind of rubbish. Remember they did some survey about the online community and concluded that a significant proportion of internet users were not discerning users of the internet....whatever that means..but the bottom line was that internet and blogs are baaddd

I think ST wanted to make a point about elitism by doing the survey but nothing came out of the survey so they felt they needed to make something up.
By  Soqcrates, at 12:48 AM  

So the bottom line now is that elite schools are baaadd?
By  Anonymous, at 7:25 PM  

Dunno. That study kinda confused me. Not sure what it was trying to say. But I guess most people would just ignore the numbers and remember the headline of the paper
By  Soqcrates, at 11:13 PM  

Post a Comment

---