Controversy Over MOSAIC's Validity and Usefulness
In an article on the method, psychologist Hill Walker, a professor at the University of Oregon and codirector of its Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior who had studied behavioral disorders in schoolchildren for 34 years told Wired, "There are some serious validity issues here, some reputation-ruining implications."
In a letter to the editor following publication of the article, de Becker wrote that MOSAIC for Assessment of Student Threats (MAST) “is the opposite of profiling in that it is always applied to an actual known individual, and it always explores actual behavior and circumstance,” although the original article never called it a method of profiling.
Professor Laurence Steinberg also questioned the need and use of the software for predicting violence:
In the late 1990s, the number of school-age children who died from homicide averaged around 2,500 a year. But fewer than half of 1 percent of them were killed in or around schools. Let's say, for argument's sake, that each of these incidents involved a student perpetrator. In a nation of 90,000 schools, trying to pick out the dozen or so students a year who might commit murder is like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of Kansas.
De Becker responded that MOSAIC for Assessment of Student Threats (MAST) is never applied to the general population of students, and rather just to those students who self-identify by making a threat.
There have been no peer reviewed studies published testing the reliability or validity of MOSAIC.
Read more about this topic: MOSAIC Threat Assessment Systems
Famous quotes containing the words controversy, validity and/or usefulness:
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or has visited a menagerie or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. “A boy,” says Plato, “is the most vicious of all beasts;” and in the same spirit the old English poet Gascoigne says, “A boy is better unborn than untaught.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“This monument, so imposing and tasteful, fittingly typifies the grand and symmetrical character of him in whose honor it has been builded. His was “the arduous greatness of things done.” No friendly hands constructed and placed for his ambition a ladder upon which he might climb. His own brave hands framed and nailed the cleats upon which he climbed to the heights of public usefulness and fame.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)