31–40 of 63 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chile's education system uses a 1-7 scale for grades
It could be argued that most western system do also, anything below a D is a fail. Depending on how you look at it we either have a 5 or 8 level system if +/- is used.
You know how people say: “on a scale of 1-10”? I’ve used the principle of Millers law to start asking people to measure on a scale of 1-7. Universally, people balk at the scale. But I explain to them that most people can’t tell the difference between 2 and 3 on a ten point scale. If you can’t articulate a difference, there’s no use in the measurement. Seven is great because you get more than the simplicity of 1-5. So…
I work on modeling human sensory perception and preference of food and beverage products, and have had to design scales that work as a true "metric";
Most scales suffer from 3 primary problems:
1) avoidance of the endpoints
2) tendency towards the mean
3) minimum information gain
For example; on a 10 point scale, very few (> .5% of respondents) will mark a 1 or 10 (this is problem 1). In addition, 5's are over represented VS the expected amount of 4's and 6's (problem 2).
These problems together reduce the amount of information inferable from the collected data. There is a number of ways to measure this, including information theory (think of the avoidence of the end points and tendency towards the mean as a lossy compression algorithm for the true signal) or as a sampling of an unrepresentative population to infer the posterior distribution.
A 100 point scale has the same problems as above, and in addition suffers from a lack of consistency (reproducibility) - respondents are likely to give a product a different score (say a 92 and 94) when asked about the same product multiple times. This will frequently lead to non-parametric rank reversals, which 1) prove that a 100 point scale is not a "metric" and 2) show that the amount of information is further reduced at higher optionality.
Thus - the discrete scales that work best are:
A) 1 - 7
B) 1 - 13
as they both do not suffer from avoidance of the end points, both have no selectable mid-point (forcing respondents to choose a point above or below the median), and are highly replicable (very few respondents will switch rank orders).
You know how people say: “on a scale of 1-10”? I’ve used the principle of Millers law to start asking people to measure on a scale of 1-7. Universally, people balk at the scale. But I explain to them that most people can’t tell the difference between 2 and 3 on a ten point scale. If you can’t articulate a difference, there’s no use in the measurement. Seven is great because you get more than the simplicity of 1-5. So…
I generally like my scales to be logarithmic. At work, I made the following scale to explain difficulty of technical items to non-technical people. It works quite well:
Effort Scale
1: Easy peasy
2: Trivial but time-consuming
3: Some invention required and non-trivial
4: Invention required
5: Lot of invention required
and for special occasions:
6: This is a whole new startup
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It could be argued that most western system do also, anything below a D is a fail. Depending on how you look at it we either have a 5 or 8 level system if +/- is used.
I'm not sure why you were DV'd, but in grad school in the US a C is considered failing.
When I was at school in the UK getting an A meant you where really good and a triple A at A level was super rare and less than you would need to get into Oxbridge
Miller’s law says that people can remember 7+/-2 things at a time. I think that’s why people usually like structured lists much better than a unstructured, unsorted laundry list.
People can remember only 4 things. The few who can remember more are the exception. That would be a much better goal for product design. You don't want designers to pack things by 7 or 9. It's too many.
You know how people say: “on a scale of 1-10”? I’ve used the principle of Millers law to start asking people to measure on a scale of 1-7. Universally, people balk at the scale. But I explain to them that most people can’t tell the difference between 2 and 3 on a ten point scale. If you can’t articulate a difference, there’s no use in the measurement. Seven is great because you get more than the simplicity of 1-5. So…
There is actually a whole theory around this, and has lots of implications for the designs of hedonic and sensory scales. I work on modeling human sensory perception and preference of food and beverage products, and have had to design scales that work as a true "metric"; Most scales suffer from 3 primary problems: 1) avoidance of the endpoints 2) tendency towards the mean 3) minimum information gain For example; on a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is actually a whole theory around this, and has lots of implications for the designs of hedonic and sensory scales. I work on modeling human sensory perception and preference of food and beverage products, and have had to design scales that work as a true "metric"; Most scales suffer from 3 primary problems: 1) avoidance of the endpoints 2) tendency towards the mean 3) minimum information gain For example; on a…
I must be missing something... why isn't 4 a midpoint of 1-7 and 6 a midpoint of 1-13? I'd think you would want an even number of points to prevent over-selection (like 0-7 or 1-8).
Forcing individuals to choose a score above or below the mean yields a better sampling of the true distribution in this case.
You know how people say: “on a scale of 1-10”? I’ve used the principle of Millers law to start asking people to measure on a scale of 1-7. Universally, people balk at the scale. But I explain to them that most people can’t tell the difference between 2 and 3 on a ten point scale. If you can’t articulate a difference, there’s no use in the measurement. Seven is great because you get more than the simplicity of 1-5. So…
The international Baccalaureate uses a 7 point scale: http://www.isnsz.com/media/images/Assessment_6.width-800.png I generally like my scales to be logarithmic. At work, I made the following scale to explain difficulty of technical items to non-technical people. It works quite well: Effort Scale 1: Easy peasy 2: Trivial but time-consuming 3: Some invention required and non-trivial 4: Invention required 5: Lot of inve…
However it seems that drivers who have an average of say "4.2", despite being perfectly fine and giving above and beyond service 1 in 5 times, gets kicked off. This means that 5 is acceptable and there's no way to mark above acceptable.
I'm odd, I don't expect every trip I get to be above average. That's clearly not possible.
On a more relevant note, it's easier to remember a large number of things when they're related to each other in meaningful ways. So the results of this little memory test aren't very good predictors of your ability to remember things in a real-world setting.