De Rerum Natura

An interesting baseline for thinking about precision error is to consider the case of uniformly random answers. The student may be completely ignorant: you gave a college level test to kindergarten kids. Your questions were so hard or so incomprehensible (think Chris Kattan’s mumbling character giving a “uupp-uizzz” (pop-quiz) to this students) that students are just guessing.

Fig. 1: Precision error for random guessers

Fig. 2: Actual student answers

Note how the answer look uniformly gray. There really is no pattern in the students response. This is a uniform group answering this exam — the random answering makes everyone belong to the same group.

This second figure is actual student answers in a test. The grayness of the diagonal squares is varying. Some questions have a precision error lower than random! Others, just as high. The noisy (imprecise questions) are the ones that gave students the most trouble.