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jwagenet | 4 months ago

The SAT and ACT plots indicate an accelerating downward trend beginning in 2018 though, later exacerbated by COVID.

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ajross|4 months ago

That is exactly the bad analysis I was calling out.

If you take a data set and point out (while squinting) that it appears maybe to be turning down in the last two data points, any reasonable analyst should point out that those look like routine outliers and that if you want to project a trend you need more data.

Instead, you'd taking a very large (and well understood) signal in the next 5-ish data points and saying that it's proof of the trend. Which is silly.

No, that chart shows covid, period. If someone wants to show an uncorrelated effect across a signal that big, they need to come to the table with a lot more sophistication than a "WTF Happened?" blog post.

jwagenet|4 months ago

Fine, the dips 2018-2019 could very well be noise and we don't dont know if that trend would have borne out after 2020. However, the ACT and SAT composites gradually declined following peaks in 07 and 12, respectively, given the available data.