Mathematics & Statistics Colloquium - Professor Cathal Walsh, University of Limerick

Wednesday, October 14, 2020 - 15:00
MS Teams

Title: A Statistician does the Leaving Cert

Speaker: Professor Cathal Walsh, University of Limerick

The talks will be held virtually this semester via Microsoft Teams. Link to join the meeting is given below.  All are welcome.
TO JOIN CLICK: Join Microsoft Teams Meeting

ABSTRACT:
The Leaving Certificate 2020 calculated grades process involved assigning marks to students in 2020 using a statistical modelling process.

This involved the use of prior attainment information for school cohorts, combined with estimates of current performance to derive a calculated mark for each individual within each subject.

When the Leaving Certificate Grades were released, the Department of Education published documents which described the information that was used, how the modelling evolved, and technical information on the process as intended and as finally realised.

Soon afterwards I was asked to review the statistical approaches used.

In this talk, I describe what the publicly available information tells us about the models used. I highlight how some statistical summaries behave; some in ways that are expected, and some that may be counterintuitive on first examination.

Image Source - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pure-mathematics-formul%C3%A6-blackboard.jpg