This is a follow up to my post on anecdotal information, and it’s a story of how close I came to slamming the door on a whole bunch of great students. A little erroneous idea of mine ran amok.
I was relatively new in my role as Registrar at Briercrest College and was generally frustrated at how late people were to submit necessary documents and information. I had a few colleagues who were very impressive researchers and academics – generally quite powerful people in the College. We were talking about the relationship between taking care of business and being successful, and as Registrar, I made the mental leap that students who took care of business by applying early must therefore be our most successful students. The corollary must also be true, I mused, late applicants must be our worst students. As further “proof”, almost all our students on Academic Probation were procrastinators and therefore they must have been late applicants.
Armed with my new anecdotal information, I got on my high horse and proposed that we set an earlier application deadline and have a hard-and-fast rule that no late applications would be considered because these students had no chance of being successful.
I took this proposal to our VP, Dr. Mark Lee (one of my heroes and still a good friend) for his input and approval. He took a look at it and asked me one question: “Do you have any data to support your conclusion that late applicants are our worst students? I’m somewhat skeptical of the idea.”
I smiled. This was going to be easy.
But you’ve heard me say that before…
I walked back down the wide hall to my office and one of my staff and I sat down to write the queries and reports for the database. But what I saw on the screen just couldn’t be correct. I said to my staff, “Mark Twain said, ‘There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics.’ Let’s rewrite this report to make it correct.”
After rewriting the report three times, we simply couldn’t make it speak the truth. Damn statistics! Mark Twain also said, “Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself…”
I must have arranged the figures all wrong because the reports were the exact opposite of what I knew to be the truth. Why were these late applicants in our top 25% of students when they should be in the bottom? It didn’t make sense.
So I thought I would track our Academic Probation students and see what their application dates were. Hmmm…. There must really be a problem with our report, or our database, or something, I thought, because these students were among our earliest applicants. Time to bring in the big guns.
I called Dr. Mark Lee and we went over the data, double-checking everything. Finally, he sat back and stroked his goatee, “I guess you have to accept it – our better students apply later than you think, and our worst students apply the earliest.” he said. “I think you’d better stop accepting early applications!” he smirked.
I let out a deflated sigh. Damn statistics!
I had been fooled by the power of assumption and anecdote. I had been schooled by the power of hard data and someone who knew how to ask the right questions.
It only took me another 10 years to figure out that I could fight fire with fire. I could use the power of assumptions, anecdotes, and powerful orators to fight lies.
But I’m a slow learner.
Who Wants To Be A Registrar? 
where’d my name come up on that report? I guess that’s the danger of making generalizations when it comes to people, who should be subject to subjective analysis instead, imo.
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You know exactly where your name showed up. In fact, I think you blogged about making a late choice to apply. We’d never know each other if my bad idea had continued to run amok. While I mostly agree with you, qualitative analysis without quantitative analysis is only half the story about people. As my social scientists friends here at TWU are fond of joking while pointing a finger at me, “Everything can be reduced to a number – EVEN YOU!”
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I can’t recall that blog point of mine, which is even funnier, because it again suggests you should look at the data for accuracy 🙂 I was always there weeks before school started, and my fingers always hovered above the keyboard while I waited for course signup to commence. You may remember the degree of mine that you signed off on?? What number in the pile of degrees to sign was my B.A. that year?
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Sorry Dave, my data isn’t quite THAT good 🙂 By the way, you were a hockey player – another group I almost did away with. You have no idea how many times you were “this close” 🙂 But that’s for another Erroneous Idea blog post.
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Mark Lee used to have a goatee???
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Poetic license, Jeremy 🙂 He already called me on it!
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Haha, the story is better that way.
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well unlike other hockey players, I performed incredible feats of competence; such as “handing assignments in on time”, “attending class” and “not failing courses”. Those sort of things seemed to keep my proverbial “balls off the bandsaw”.
Don’t be so quick to write off hockey players — you were once one yourself you know! I only expected that kind of thought process from Glenn Runnals, and his cronies. You were my inside guy!
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Once! Still am a hockey player, my friend. It wasn’t intentional on my part to write off hockey players, but it could have been a by-product of another of my “little” ideas. I didn’t mean to imply that you personally were “this close”, although there were numerous times in my tenure there that the hockey team was at great risk behind the scenes. You were part of new crop of players that actually cared about balancing education and sports. Your “incredible feats of competence” were a breath of fresh air for me 🙂
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I’m laughing because I had applied to Briercrest only a week before school started, was accepted and then in my first year was on the honour roll. Then later upon graduation, I was hired by the College to recruit new students. I must have been one of those statistics.
ME 🙂
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You were awfully close to being a statistic 🙂 It was fun working with you, too.
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