Statistical chutzpah in the Indiana school grade-changing scandal

I wrote a piece for Slate yesterday about Tony Bennett, the former Indiana schools czar who intervened in the state’s school-grading system to ensure that a politically connected public charter got an A instead of a C.  (The AP’s Tom LoBianco broke the original story.)  Bennett offered interviewers an explanation for the last-minute grade change which was plainly contradicted by the figures in the internal e-mails LoBianco had obtained and released.  Presumably, Bennett figured nobody would bother to look at the actual numbers.  That is incredibly annoying.

Summary of what actually happened in Indiana, by analogy:

Suppose the syllabus for my math class said that the final grade would be determined by averaging the homework grade and the exam grade, and that the exam grade was itself the average of the grades on the three tests I gave. Now imagine a student gets a B on the homework, gets a D-minus on the first two tests, and misses the third. She then comes to me and says, “Professor, your syllabus says the exam component of the grade is the average of my grade on the three tests—but I only took twotests, so that line of the syllabus doesn’t apply to my special case, and the only fair thing is to drop the entire exam component and give me a B for the course.”

I would laugh her out of the office. Or maybe suggest that she apply for a job as a state superintendent of instruction.