Thursday, January 07, 2010

IB Results

So hilarious. It reminds me almost entirely of the past, except that this time the results mattered a lot more. And this time maybe there'll be one or two others who get how this feels. Not. Who am I kidding?

See, the Elite Squad works on a different level from the rest. Layman statistics don't apply to them - they're not the 'normal' that a statistician speaks of. There's a need to completely regather data when you want to find out about them. And if you're part of this group you can't rely on the statistics of the layman to decide your strength - the weakest would probably be slightly below average here.

This isn't a situation where one can stare at the rest of the masses and go "Hey, what about them? I'm better than him, him, him, him, and the rest of them!" because it just doesn't work. Did Newton go about saying that he was better than all the people who weren't standing on the shoulders of giants? Never - it's evident enough that he's far more far-sighted than the rest already, and comparing yourself with them would bring yourself down to their level. What would gravity have to say about that?

I was of a class where the class mean was higher than the level mode, which was higher than the level mean. The class mode was one from a perfect score. Layman statistics just fail when it comes to these people.Forcing the square peg into the round hole would give two conclusions: Three people are below average in a class of twenty-nine. The mean student would be better than 74.5% of the school population. Two ridiculous conclusions by a long shot, and reflective of the failure of standard statistical figures being applied to non-standard groups.

What am I, then? The normal within the abnormal. The average within the extremities. The standard solider within the elite squad.

It is... dreadfully painful to have to be seen as abnormal by the normal and normal by the abnormal. Because that makes you a person belonging to neither group, with a certain sense of loneliness to the normality of the situation.

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