My college recently sent an email to everyone asking them to participate in a lengthy anonymous survey to get statistics on food and housing needs of the students.
Here are some of the amazingly bad questions on this thing:
Do you current not need food stamps?
A. Yes
B. No
C. Not Sure
I’m Not Sure WTF the correct answer to that question is.
There’s also all sorts of leading questions; a result of a lack of branching logic in the survey. They’ll ask stuff like “did you leave your primary residence in the past 12 months?” And most people, like me, would select No. Then they follow it up with questions like, “Did you leave because of a fire or structural damage?” Answering “No” implies that you left for some other reason, even if you’ve been in the same place.
I would have been ashamed to have written that ungrammatical a sentence when I was in third grade. The other problems with the survey pale next to its having been written by illiterates.
I looked at it again and apparently I was slightly misreading it. The actual question is “Do you currently not need food stamps?”
So not quite as bad, but still a terrible question due to interrogating on a negative. The possible answers, at least colloquially, can mean the same thing: “Yes, I currently don’t need food stamps.” “No, I currently don’t need food stamps.”
Since this is aimed at college students, the negative question is particularly bad, because some will not be native speakers of English, and the rules for “yes” and “no” answers to negative questions in their first language are likely to be different.
Hey, this is your Federal Government in action. Obviously, they are looking to “boost participation”-because they don’t want their budget cut. Some hack needs to increase his numbers, so he can qualify for a promotion/pay raise.
I think that there are some psychological tests that like to ask questions in the negative to make sure you are reading the questions thoroughly, especially the tests that ask you similar things in different ways to check for consistency.
e.g.:
I get angry easily. (T/F)
…
It is not the case that I feel a lot of anger. (T/F)
If you answer True to both questions above, then your dishonesty or carelessness score goes up.
Your **college **sent this? :eek: O ye gods. Did they have, perhaps, some junior idiot who cannot be trusted to do actual work, so they gave her/him this to play with, thus keeping said idiot out of the way?
Really, what a terrible waste of time. Is there any actual college rule that precludes you from hunting down this waste of oxygen and chopping its head off? I mean, it’s not as though the creature uses the brain much, and it would be a service to society.