April 19, 2014

Seeing no evil

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The Herald story “Uni cheats: hundreds punished” is a pretty good example of using actual data to combat the ‘false balance’ problem in journalism.  The story notes the huge variation in official proceedings for cheating between NZ universities — nearly half the cases are at Waikato — and rightly highlights it as “suggesting differences in what institutions consider cheating, and how they target and record it.”

As the story doesn’t point out, with 540 cases out of more than 400000 tertiary students it’s pretty clear cheating is underreported everywhere. That’s hardly surprising, given the costs and benefits to staff for following it up. If it wasn’t for the irrational rage cheating arouses in academics, it would be perfectly safe.

 

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »