<p>I just had this crazy idea the other day that colleges could be publishing misleading information (and probably in many more ways than this). </p>
<p>Many colleges will give a breakdown of classes based on the number of people in each class and the percentage of classes that have those number of students. But these numbers are based on the classes not the students. Take an extreme example.</p>
<p>A college has 1000 classes. 999 of these classes have one student and one class has 999 students. </p>
<p>A college brochure would say that 99.9% of classes have less than ten students. Only .1% has more than ten students. Wow that's amazing and everyone would think that all of their classes would be less than ten students.</p>
<p>However if students had to take two classes in college and one was the large one and one was a small one, then actually 50% of the classes that a student would take would be more than ten students. </p>
<p>.1% and 50% are much different numbers but they describe the same situation in this case. Obviously, in real life this is not so drastic but I still think that this a false way of reporting class sizes. Does anyone think that this is relevant at all? Is my thinking correct? Thanks.</p>
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