Wouter van Ooijen wrote:
> Every survey shows that the majority of the drivers thinks they
> themselves are competent but the majority of (other) drivers is
> incompetent. Same results for other desirable attributes like
> honestly, handsomeness, intelligence, ...

And of course realistic assesement of one's own abilities ;-)

Way back in high school, we had to conduct a survey on a topic of our
choice, then analyze, write up, and present our results to the class.  Our
class was broken into about 5-8 groups for that purpose, each doing one of
these surveys.

At the time this felt pointless to me, so I convinced our group to do the
survey on surveys.  While you can't prove someone is filling out a survey
honestly, you can prove they are being dishonest just from the survey
information alone in some cases.  We disguised our survey as asking about
teenage drinking habits, but at the bottom had a single question that asked
whether you lied anywhere on the survey.  If you checked it, you definitely
lied (think about it carefully).  The result was around 15% were proven to
have lied if I remember right.  We used this figure to analyze the results
from the other groups, mostly to show how they were often meaningless.

We got a good grade despite grumbling from the teacher and protestations
from other groups, but in future years this was specifically outside the
bounds.  We had the advantage of it never having been tried before.

--=20
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
.