sketerpot comments on Shut Up And Guess - Less Wrong

79 Post author: Yvain 21 July 2009 04:04AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 21 July 2009 05:46:33AM 5 points [-]

When I took my high school's AP Calculus classes these last two years, the teacher pointed out that since, on average, guessing would give the same result as leaving questions blank, you might as well guess. As far as I know, nobody disagreed with him.

(Actually, he said it's better to guess, because leaving a question blank means running the risk of accidentally putting the next question's answer in the wrong place--which, in one case, led to a student answering practically every question in one section wrongly. But that's relatively impertinent.)

Comment author: sketerpot 21 July 2009 07:13:11PM 1 point [-]

Guessing, if you have no idea which way to guess is more likely, will not have quite the same result as leaving questions blank. Leaving questions blank will add 0 to your score, while guessing will add a mostly-Gaussian random variable with a mean of 0. The math of this is kind of fun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk

And of course, the central limit theorem is colossally important:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem

Comment author: ciphergoth 25 July 2009 10:41:39AM 0 points [-]

No need to invoke that here - directly calculating the probabilities using the binomial distribution is perfectly practical in this instance.