Chance News 109

Quotations

"We’ve reached that stage of the campaign. The back-to-school commercials are on the air, and the 'unskewing' of polls has begun — the quadrennial exercise in which partisans simply adjust the polls to get results more to their liking, usually with a thin sheen of math-y words to make it all sound like rigorous analysis instead of magical thinking."

--Harry Enten, in: The polls aren’t skewed: Trump really is losing badly, FiveThirtyEight.com, 9 August 2016

Submitted by Bill Peterson

Forsooth

"The LSAT predicted 14 percent of the variance between the first-year grades [in a study of 981 University of Pennsylvania Law School students]. And it did a little better the second year: 15 percent. Which means that 85 percent of the time it was wrong."

--Lani Guinier, in: The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (Beacon Press 2015), p. 19.

Submitted by Margaret Cibes