ponderings & pennings

A few days back my friend remarked that "Its so easy to criticise".

Though I tended to agree with him then, today I just happened to get the empirical evidence on a sample size of 72. The inference that it is indeed easy to criticise is represented in the graph below (the analysis of data methods are getting themselves ingrained in my behavior - )

The graph has two situations - one in blue is the initial assignment that we were given of writing a letter. After we had done with the assignment, our assignment was given to another group to critique it and the red bars represent the criticism. The height of blue and red bars represents the number of groups receiving the grades A, B, C or D in writing a letter (blue) and criticising others’ letter (red).

Though the exercise was aimed at a completely different purpose, I tended to derive other inferences from it which follow.

We see that though no one received an A in the intial writing we have 5 groups with an A when it comes to criticising. To quantify this, the weighted average score in letter writing at a relative constant scale is 2.92 and that of criticising is 4.08 - an improvement of 40%!. I actually don’t know what to infer from this 40%, but I am sure that people do better when they criticise (40% better?). At least for us, some of us have actually been able to improve their overall scores by getting better scores in their criticism of others’ letters.

Well, I won’t do justice, if I don’t declare that my grade in both writing the letter and criticsing someone else’s letter was the same: "B". This shows, I guess that I am as good at doing things as I am at criticising.