The Business Standard is innumerate

I guess there is not that much information in the headline here – claiming that a bunch of journalists and editors are innumerate is like saying that the sky is blue. You would be hard-pressed to find journalists and editors who can actually parse numbers, though I must mention that I’ve been lucky enough to work with a few editors who actually understand arithmetic!

So what happened today? Basically in today’s front page, BS journalists (one Vinay Umarji in particular) and editors have displayed an utter lack of understanding on how relative grading and percentiles work. The context is CAT results, which came out yesterday.

(I’ve put a scan since the online version is behind a paywall).

There is information in saying that “number of candidates scoring 100 percentile is lowest in six years”, and the information I take out of that is that the number of test takers this year is the lowest in six years.

And for four of those six years, the numbers were inflated, since double the number of people who were supposed to get 100 percentile actually got 100 percentile. Since CAT percentiles are given to two decimal places, you get 100 percentile if you are in the top 0.005% of all candidates who took the exam. Or – if your “percentile” is higher than 99.995, it gets rounded up to 100.

For three years in the middle, the CAT administrators (usually they’re Quantitative Methods professors at IIMs), for whatever reason, rounded up everyone who got a percentile higher than 99.990 to 100. I’d written about that in my article for Mint three years back.

Coming back, CAT is an exam that follows relative grading. All that someone  has got “100 percentile” means is that they are within the top 0.005% of all candidates who wrote the exam. So if more candidates write the exam, more people will get “100 percentile”. In my time, for example (CAT 2003-4) some 1.3 lakh people had written the exam, so 7 of us got “100 percentile”. Nowadays the number of test takers has gone up, so more people get that score.

And then I found the rest of the article funny in a way as well, trying to do some sort of sociological analysis of the backgrounds of the people who had scored highly in the exam.

PS: The graph doesn’t give out much information (and I don’t know why the 2019 data point is missing there), but I guess it’s been put in there to make the journalists and editors seem more numerate than they are.