So, how weird is this world of ours?
The Herald, July 13, 2005
What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? ...
...an examination of what leads people to cheat which resulted in comparing schoolteachers to sumo wrestlers. He discovered that 5% of elementary school teachers in Chicago doctored the children's answers after the city introduced tests which rewarded schools for improved results. Levitt devised a formula for identifying classes where the pattern of answers suggested they might have been altered and after re-testing those classes against a control group a number of teachers were sacked.
A similar statistical analysis proved that sumo wrestling in Japan was corrupt. Wrestlers who had successfully made it into the next grade were found to be throwing fights where they had nothing to lose but their opponents had something to gain. Essentially the wrestlers and the teachers had the same incentive to cheat....more...
