Defining Outliers – cartoon flashback

Today’s cartoon flashback comes from a post featuring ethics stories contributed by a silent collaborator.  I think this was my favorite of the bunch.

Defining Outlier
Evaluators: “Here are the results from your program.”
Client: “Those results aren’t accurate.”
Evaluators: “How so?”
Client: “The bad results are obviously outliers. You need to remove those people from the sample.”
Evaluators: “We define an outlier as (1.5 x the interquartile range) below quartile 1 or above quartile 3. Other evaluators define outliers as 3 standard deviations above or below the mean. We checked, and those people are not outliers. In fact, their experience in the program was pretty typical.”
Client: “Sorry, I didn’t realize it was such a hassle to fix. I didn’t mean to create more work for you. Just send me the Word version of your report and I’ll delete that section myself.”