Abstract
THE report of the Committee of the Royal Statistical Society on the Status of Statisticians, appointed by the Council on July 22, 1943 as amended and adopted by the Council, has now been issued. The present position in Great Britain is regarded as unsatisfactory in some respects. First, an employer requiring the services of a statistician on his staff has no common standard among the qualifications which he can accept as a certificate of proficiency, and the report, in confirmation of this point, notes that in recent discussions on the Society's report on official statistics, the Treasury representatives indicated how useful it would be to departments, in considering appointments to responsible positions in statistical branches, if approved statistical qualifications were in existence. The position is also unsatisfactory to an employer, because there are no generally recognized definitions or descriptions of the various types of statistician. It is equally unsatisfactory to the employee, because there is no recognized status in his profession and no generally approved method of distinguishing between a genuinely accomplished man and a mere quack, or even a rank impostor. It is also unsatisfactory to an employee not to have any standards by which he can judge the level of his own attainment, or to which he can work. The situation is unsatisfactory for the general public, which is affected more than it realizes by bad statistical work.
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Status of Statisticians. Nature 154, 112 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/154112b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/154112b0