Unintended correlation
To the Editor:
I picked up my favorite College of William and Mary news source today, The Flat Hat, and was entirely offended by the headline of the front page story by Anne Foster. The headline read “Incoming class most diverse ever,” while the sub headline included “SAT range drops slightly.”
While I am sure that the copy editor meant no offense, the headlines seemed to imply that there was a correlation between racial diversity and a drop in SAT range. This seems especially absurd, considering that the range only fluctuated 10 points at the bottom. This is not a statistically significant difference.
For people that only read the headlines or the lede, they will receive the wrong impression about this article. Besides this error, keep up the good work on an excellent school paper.
— Luke Merrell ’11
