Kilopascal in USMA 13550 passed on a query from Stephen Gallagher >Subject: Re: Lexiles! Help me somebody. [Yahoo! Clubs: Metric America] > >> One definition of "metric", that is >> frequently used in the computer industry, >> and sometimes the business world in general >> is "measurement of quality". >> >> When I was a COBOL programmer, my department >> was told that an outside agency had been hired >> to perform "metrics" on the programs we >> had written. >> >> What this meant was that this agency was >> going to evaluate our programs >> using a system that they had developed >> to measure such things as efficiency, >> complexity, intricacy, readability, etc. >> >> In the case of the sentence below: >> >> "The Lexile Framework for Reading is an educational tool that links test >and readers under a common metric without subjective evaluation." >> >> It's simply a fancy way of saying that this >> reading system has a standardized testing >> procedure, that eliminates the need for >> any input or opinion by the person scoring >> the test. The same test should always >> get the same result, regardless of who >> is scoring it. >> >> Does that make sense? >> >> Stephen Gallagher Quite correct. Any system of measurement is a metric system. There have been many. When the people on this list refer to "the metric system" we mean "the decimal metric system", which was its original description. Joseph B. Reid 17 Glebe Road West Toronto M5P 1C8 Tel. 416 486-6071
