Not the Last Word: Harvard Beats Yale and Other Fallacies
- PDF / 336,920 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 18 Downloads / 178 Views
Clin Orthop Relat Res (2013) 471:3745–3749 / DOI 10.1007/s11999-013-3337-4
A Publication of The Association of Bone and Joint Surgeons®
Published online: 19 October 2013
Ó The Association of Bone and Joint Surgeons1 2013
Not the Last Word Not the Last Word: Harvard Beats Yale and Other Fallacies Joseph Bernstein PhD
O
ne of the great academic rivalries in the United States is between the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning, Harvard University, and its New England neighbor to the south, Yale University. Both of these Ivy League schools typically stand near the top of national rankings, and jostling for the number one spot is a favored pastime among many of their alumni. When the 1968 Harvard versus Yale football game ended in a draw, for example, the Harvard student newspaper
The author certifies that he, or a member of his immediate family, has no funding or commercial associations (eg, consultancies, stock ownership, equity interest, patent/ licensing arrangements, etc) that might pose a conflict of interest in connection with the submitted article. All ICMJE Conflict of Interest Forms for authors and Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research1 editors and board members are on file with the publication and can be viewed on request. The opinions expressed are those of the writers, and do not reflect the opinion or policy of Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research1 or the Association of Bone and Joint Surgeons1. J. Bernstein PhD (&) Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of Pennsylvania, 424 Stemmler Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA e-mail: [email protected]
published the headline, ‘‘Harvard beats Yale 29-29.’’ Both Harvard and Yale boast top notch orthopaedic surgery departments, yet the orthopaedic residency at Yale is more likely to come up short on one Residency Review Committee (RRC) guideline for program evaluation, namely, that ‘‘a board certification rate [of its graduates] greater than 75% is required to maintain Residency Review Committee Accreditation’’ [4]. The assertion that Yale is more likely to violate this 75% RRC standard says nothing about the superior didactic programs or clinical experiences at Harvard. Rather, it relies on a long-known, but frequently forgotten mathematical phenomenon: variance increases with decreasing sample size. Therefore, a smaller program is more likely to be found at the extremes of performance, both good and bad. The larger a program is, the more it is protected against lowprobability events (such has having too many recent graduates fail to pass their boards). The residency program at Harvard graduates 12 residents per year, and the program at Yale graduates five. Advantage: Harvard. Here’s why. Assuming that every graduate has a p chance of passing the boards examination, one can employ the binomial distribution to determine
the chance that there will be at least m students out of n who pass in a given year [1]. For the Harvard program, if each of the 12 residents has an 80% chance of passing, there is 79.4% chance that in a given y
Data Loading...
