Tuesday, March 20, 2012

College Level Math?

The local University paper is a rag full of budding 'authorized journalists' who have a bad habit of mis-spelling even their own advertisements. It comes as no surprise that they come out against CCW for Illinois.

They 'surveyed' a whopping 40 students (out of about 12,000), many not even eligible to own a handgun, to ask if they'ld carry a firearm. Let's look at the results:
Out of the 40 students, 27.5 percent said they would not carry a firearm, fearing they might cause a self-induced injury.
That would be 11 out of 40.
Twenty-five percent of Eastern students polled said they would not carry guns because of the violence they could bring to campus.
That would be 10 out of 40.
More than 22 percent of students said they feel safe enough on Eastern’s campus without guns.
9/40
More than 17 percent of polled students said they just have no desire to ever carry a gun.
7/40
Five percent of polled students said they fear guns.
2/40
Over 2 percent of students said they will not carry guns because they were raised in a household that did not believe in the use of handguns.
1/40

So it appears the questions were loaded to NOT carrying firearms and they still couldn't get a clear majority of answers opposing it.

This is what the education system is teaching budding 'journalists' to do and the lack of critical thinking in today's University students.

Weep for the future.

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3 comments:

Divemedic said...

You can't blame the students for all of it. Read my post about the activities of the professors at my college.

http://street-pharmacy.blogspot.com/2012/03/more-education.html

Anonymous said...

I wonder if any of them have ever fired anything stronger than a playstation controller while playing GTA, which I suspect today's youth bases all of its decisions upon as "experience" in their saged years. Other than Hollywood movies from the land of the never emptying ammunition clip (yea I said clip) and the auto Glock 8 that magically floats thru metal detectors unseen. 30 years of mind washing in the public education system adds up and takes its toll.

Linoge said...

Just so everyone is on the same page, with a population of 12,000 and only 40 students polled, that gives you a confidence level of 47%. In other words, if they were to repeat the survey, it is fairly likely they would find the opposite result of what they recorded.

Basic statistics are not generally hard, folks, and there are even handy-dandy calculators online that will do most of the hard work for you - for instance, if you wanted a 5% margin of error (pretty standard) and a 90% confidence level (on the low side, but, basically, if you were to repeat the poll, you stand a 90% chance of getting the same answers within +-5%) and you assume the response distribution is 50% (probably inaccurate, but we do not have any hard numbers either way), then you need to interview about 265 folks to get a good feel for the 12,000's tendencies.