Quote:
Originally Posted by CamaroSkooter
Someone needs to inform the author(s) of this article that their statistical conclusions are fundamentally flawed. The first statistic they mention (the 23% failure rate) is among individuals who take the test. The second statistic they mention (the Pentagon's 75% elgibility rate) is among all citizens aged 17 to 24. Neither statistic is related to the other. And yet the article author(s) are trying to use them in conjunction. You could have a physically fit 26 year old that never took the test and he (or she) doesn't get represented in EITHER set of statistics. They're trying to take the worst possible conclusions (albeit flawed) from both sets of statistics and combine them into one big doom-and-gloom assumption.
Then there's the problem with drawing conclusions from these statistics in the first place. If you tell them to break the statistics out by any number of different criteria, like ethnicity or socio-economic background, you would get a much better idea of what's at play here. I would venture a guess that the majority of the 23% failure rate can be attributed to inner-city minorities or, like brandotron's example, upper-income individuals that are required to take it by their high school who fail it on purpose to avoid being recruited. And I would also guess that the majority of the 75% of people that the Pentagon deems "unfit" are primarily made up of overweight kids who have never done a complete push-up in their life. The majority of those individuals could easily be shaped up by getting sent to FTU before beginning Basic.
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What he said. I was going to say the exact same thing until he beat me to it.
NOT
