a perfect fit

Here is the table that kept most French commentators on the primaries busy on Monday, since the fit of the results at 10am to the results at the previous midnight is perfect, indicating the 10am results are not results… There was even a line in Le Monde about achieving this perfect fit being of order 10⁻³, “un miracle statistique de l’ordre d’une chance sur mille”, although no details of this arcane calculation are provided! I wonder why a journalist writing about nonsensical data feels obliged to add more nonsensical data to “support” one’s argument. [Thanks to Arthur Charpentier for sending me the data.]

An ethical issue

A few weeks ago, I was asked to act as an external referee for a PhD thesis. This thesis involved some improvement upon standard statistical methodology and applications to another field. When I eventually got the PhD document, I discovered that it started with a preface (written by the PhD student) containing claims that the student’s work has been used by co-workers, incl. the PhD supervisor, and published in a refereed journal without the student’s name nor agreement, but also with some fabricated data… This was quite a shock as I had not been made aware of this super-delicate issue a priori. And I had not information on the published piece of work,  which seemed to be in the other field (I have not been able to find it since then). When I complained to the university, I got transferred to the dean of graduate studies, who almost immediately withdrew the demand for a PhD evaluation [by me]…

I find the whole affair quite bizarre. and somewhat perturbating. Indeed, when I recontacted the university to mention my concerns, I got the following [edited and possibly translated] email

As I’m sure you can appreciate, this is an unusual case. [We were] not able to alert you to this when nominating you as  examiners, as it is important that we follow our University process and allow examiners to reach independent conclusions as to the value of the work before them.  [We are] bound by our PhD Statute and would be prejudicing the examination  process if [we] provided additional information to examiners. [We] would also be providing a route for the candidate to appeal the outcome of the examination process.

This does not make any sense to me given that any referee of this thesis is going to hit the same case when reading the first pages of the thesis… Either the PhD student should remove this complaint from the PhD document (but this does not seem right, given that there is a published paper containing some of the results claimed in the thesis, even though referees from Statistics are very unlikely to be aware of it, as, again, I could not find the corresponding paper), or the whole information should be provided to the referees of the thesis so that they can judge the matter in full light… I do not see how I could pursue the matter any further, but the whole story left me feeling quite uncomfortable.

R exam postprocessing

Following my three-fold R exam of last month, I had a depressing afternoon meeting (with other faculty members) some students who had submitted R codes that were suspiciously close to other submitted R codes… In other words, it looked very  likely they had cheated. (A long-term issue with my R course, alas!) During this meeting, they actually admitted either to directly copying on their neighbour’s screen, due to the limited number of terminals that forces students to be too close to one another, or to looking at (and copying) another student’s  R code file from an earlier exam.  I used different exams but with enough of the same spirit that some of the R code could be recycled.) Besides the pain of having to turn to disciplinary action at a level where students should see the point of getting real skills towards an incoming hiring, the depressing consequence of this state of affairs is that next we will have to move to a higher level of “security” when running the R exam, which most likely means we will turn back to a pencil-and-paper exam…. A paradoxical situation when teaching a computer programming course! But unless some unlikely sponsor delivers a computer room able to handle 180 students all at once, I do not see any other solution. Suggestions?!