I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

I also was not being a smart ass. Many authors have additional writings that add color to the writing being studied.

I absolutely agree with this. This was a constant source of frustration for me in literature classes. I enjoyed exploring alternative solutions and answers. Most science teachers encouraged that, even though there mostly was a "right" answer and I was missing some (mostly unknown to me) details in alternative theories. Exploring alternatives helps (me) to understand the problem and solution better.

But in the most subjective classes possible - literature analysis - where nobody really knows what the author meant, alternative opinions were considered wrong. And my only task was to repeat the teachers or text books opinion. Frustrating is an understatement.

This part of the article captures the issue perfectly:

> I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.

In fact, anecdotes are the way in which we are able to make sense of the world at all. We do not as individuals do most of our learning via explicit statistical analysis.

Your essential point, however, stands in the sense that one should certainly not act as if anecdotes are statistically unbiased. And your average person is terrible at proper statistical reasoning. People tend to over-emphasize their own experience. (Though this is evolutionarily and historically useful - a feature, not a bug). So, yes, someone presenting their own anecdote or set of anecdotes as data is often misguided.

But there are, in fact, many studies (academic or industrial), that, are, in fact, just that! Collections of anecdotes. Self-reported experiences via surveys, error reports, reviews, and the like, which can be mined for data or looked at to see if there are any patterns.

There are issues such as "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain... There are three basic approaches: Ignore the problem and use the results as-is. Declare the sample hopelessly biased and throw it out altogether until you can find a more representative sample. Or acknowledge the bias in the sample, but continue to use it along with careful annotations as a low-confidence best-guess until better data come along. The last is the obvious best approach in an ideal world, though biases such as motivated reasoning and poor reporting by the media often means that reporting such partial results can do more harm than good.

For a more mathematically grounded approach, you could apply Bayesian reasoning: take into account your priors (including the best guess of your expected bias in your sample compared to the distribution from which you are sampling), and figure out exactly how much evidence each anecdote constitutes. It might not be much, but it's something.

I'll close by mentioning that the quote is actually a misquote: http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-i...

“I said ‘The plural of anecdote is data’ some time in the 1969-70 academic year while teaching a graduate seminar at Stanford. The occasion was a student’s dismissal of a simple factual statement–by another student or me–as a mere anecdote." - Wolfinger

From what I remember of the standardized tests, they were either more interested in marking the structure of the content than the content itself, or looking for keywords and marking off a checklist.

To the snarky cynic in me, this might be good training for resume-writing, but not really how you want to teach your high school students to be good at creative interpretation.