[keithpeter]

When data is easy to collect, someone will ask you to collect it and someone else will query the data and compile a report with percentages in it. Then someone else will worry about some of the percentages being less or more than some benchmark. Then your work life will become less happy.

Example 1: Some years ago, I had to sit through a meeting where a committee worried about a 2% drop in satisfaction scores on a student questionnaire. No-one checked how many replies were involved (around 400, so it worked out to about 6 people less in the second year than the first as the ratings were something like 75%).

Example 2: I recently had to add comments in a record system about students whose attendance percentage had dropped below 90%. That was 8 weeks into the course...