Today, I found a site entitled Mr Meyrowitz’s Class that links to my first post on coincidences in lotteries as an example of “fatal error”. This seems to be part of a student’s assignment, apparently for the CollegeBoard programme, with 10 minutes allocated to students to find my “fatal error with decimals and probabilities”… As there is no hint, I wonder where my fatal error stands: I could not find it after those 10 minutes of intense searching and recomputing. Maybe Mr Meyrowitz actually needs new glasses to spot the difference between a 1‰ chance and a 1% chance… (Which actually misled a few other readers of the post.)
Question 6) in this assignment also sounds very much inspired from another of my posts on coincidences in lotteries [although not acknowledged in the assignment] since the question refers to the same original France Soir article in French. The question is however rather vague: “do you suspect him of cheating?” and it shows a lack of knowledge about French loto where cheating is [close to] impossible. It is certainly not recommended as an exercise for beginning students in probability or statistics. [Actually, in my opinion, the whole assignment is poor, being either imprecise, e.g question 7), useless, as for question 4) “Pick one topic that you understand very well and one that you do not understand well” (!), or plain wrong, as for question 2)…]
Xi'an's Og 