From akriman@darwin.helios.nd.edu Sun Feb 9 04:01:18 2003 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.132]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with ESMTP id h19C1HCK055406 for ; Sun, 9 Feb 2003 04:01:17 -0800 Received: from mailspool.helios.nd.edu (mailspool.helios.nd.edu [129.74.250.7]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with ESMTP id h19C1GfV021435 for ; Sun, 9 Feb 2003 04:01:16 -0800 Received: from darwin.helios.nd.edu (darwin.helios.nd.edu [129.74.250.114]) by mailspool.helios.nd.edu (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id HAA04534 for ; Sun, 9 Feb 2003 07:01:14 -0500 (EST) Received: (from akriman@localhost) by darwin.helios.nd.edu (8.12.6/8.12.6/ND-cluster) id h19C1F2b011658 for classics@u.washington.edu; Sun, 9 Feb 2003 07:01:15 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2003 07:01:15 -0500 (EST) From: Alfred M Kriman Message-Id: <200302091201.h19C1F2b011658@darwin.helios.nd.edu> To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: selector > how to compute raw scores MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Here is how your score is computed on the "ethical philosophy selector." A comparison of "raw scores" (see step 3) is more informative than the final scores output by the program. (But neither mean much.) (1) For each philosophy, you score a number of points on each answered question (0-10). Those scores are listed in a table that I posted as an appendix, and that is temporarily available at http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/appendix.html (2) The points on each question are weighted (multiplied) by a priority factor: 0.5 for "low", 1.0 for "medium", 1.5 for "high." (3) All of the weighted points for a particular philosophy are summed to produce a raw score. For God's sake, don't compute more than one raw score for any particular choice of answers and weights! See next. (4) The selector expresses your score as a percentage of your highest raw score (let's call that the "final score"). The percentage is truncated ("rounded down") to a whole number. To save time determining your raw scores, just compute one (nonzero) raw score and compare it to the corresponding final score to determine a conversion factor. Note: Step (4) only occurs if you selected some answer other than the catch-all ("Doesn't matter/Dislike all answer choices"). If all the answers you chose to answer, you answered with that choice, then all your raw scores are 0 and the program outputs "0%" matches. Note: I haven't actually seen the code, and I don't know the internal representation of the philosophies, etc. If it hadn't been easy, I would describe the above as the result of reverse-engineering the test. Example: To be prohibitively Kantian, reset and select answers 5c (low priority) and 7a (medium priority). From the table, you see that Kant scores these answers 9 and 10, resp. (step 1). These have to be multiplied by priority factors of 0.5 and 1 (step 2), yielding a raw Kant score of 9*0.5 + 10 = 14.5 (step 3). This turns out (by design) to be the highest raw score, so the conversion factor from final score to raw score is 14.5/100%. The next two final scores are 65% (Plato and Rand), so for this your raw score was about 9.425. (Obviously 9.5 with a little erosion due to rounding of the percentage.) Recommendation: My guess is that the best way to use the selector is to pick and choose your answers. If you give too many answers that are not your own firm points of view, then you'll just get opinion stew, weighting many positions you care little about more than the few that matter. Trying to prompt the OSU archive to thread these related posts, I include > Since there was so much interest in the results of the moral > philosophy selector (http://www.selectsmart.com/PHILOSOPHY/) > on Friday, I investigated its innards. AMK .