Originally posted on http://www.howtomeasureanything.com/forums/ on Wednesday, July 08, 2009 2:46:05 PM by

“Hi Doug,

I want to share an observation a V.P. made after doing the 10 pass fail questions. If one was to input 50% confidence to all the questions and randomly selected T/F they would be correct 1/2 the time the difference would be 2.5.

The scoring would indicate that that person was probably overconfident. Can you help here ?.

I am considering making the difference between the overall series of answers (as a decimal) and the Correct answers(as a decimal) as needing to be greater than 2.5 for someone to be probably overconfident.

please advise

Thaks in advance – Hugh”

Yes, that is a way to “game the system” and the simple scoring method I show would indicate the person was well calibrated (but not very informed about the topic of the questions). It is also possible to game the 90% CI questions by simply creating absurdly large ranges for 90% of the questions and ranges we know to be wrong for 10% of them. That way, they would always get 90% of the answers within their ranges.

If the test-takers were, say, students, who simply wanted to appear calibrated for the purpose of a grade, then I would not be surprised if they tried to game the system this way. But we assume that most people who want to get calibrated realize they are developing a skill they will need to apply in the real world. In such cases they know they really aren’t helping themselves by doing anything other than putting their best calibrated estimates on each individual question.

However, there are also ways to counter system-gaming even in situations where the test taker has no motivation whatsoever to actually learn how to apply probabilities realistically. In the next edition of How to Measure Anything I will discuss methods like the “Brier Score” which would penalize anyone who simply flipped a coin on each true/false question and answered them all as 50% confident. In a Brier Score, the test taker would have gotten a higher score if they put higher probabilities on questions they thought they had a good chance of getting right. Simply flipping a coin to answer all the questions on a T/F test and calling them each 50% confident produces a Brier score of zero.

Thanks for your interest,

Doug Hubbard