On Friday, July 4, 2003, at 06:58 PM, asimovd@aol.com wrote:
Two comments.
One, the stem-and-leaf plots were invented by the late statistician & topologist John Tukey and described in his book Exploratory Data Analysis. If it's not part of the curriculum in NY state, then I find it moronic that this was put on the exam; if it is part of the curriculum, then it seems quite reasonable.
Even so: a) what about students who transfer from out of state? b) It seems like it has probably been a nice trick for certain tasks, but I doubt whether Tukey would have accepted this version as a "plot" where the sequence of stems used have two gaps. It's certainly misleading as a plot, unless it's purely a rank-order scale (which seems dubious in context). It also doesn't make sense for a data-sorting shortcut, because you don't know ahead of times which bins will be used. c). It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that makes sense to prescribe as a **universal** part of the curriculum in NY, even if it's good for a sub-population, especially since computers make this kind of shortcut obsolete. It doesn't have the kind of central importance that should be the criterion for this test. Bill