[Meta] What is the purpose of the "Percent Correct" answers on a user profile? Maybe remove it?

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Here on Unity Answers, each user has a stat for Percent Correct answers on his/her profile. I find this stat to be highly subjective, as it seems to represent the percentage of accepted answers, and we cannot judge the correctness of an answer in an automated way with today's technology.

More importantly, I feel it discourages posting new, better answers to questions with already accepted answers, because it will lower the stat. At best, it is an uphill battle against users who do not accept answers, so I suggest simply eliminating the stat.

What do you think? What's the purpose of this stat? Does it mean that a user with a 30% answer acceptance rate is bad at answering questions? I don't think so!

Answer 1

Answer by Owen-Reynolds · Jul 23, 2017 at 05:23 AM

One nice effect was it got people to write Comments as comments (since people who cared about their scores didn't want to risk an Unaccepted answer.) Then comments like "did you set X?" often later got written out into more complete answers if the OP wrote "doh! that was it." That was good since it made the site easier to search.

You'd think a negative effect is the "please accept this" begging comments. But I think those are mostly about getting the 15 points (people care more about points, for the unlocks(?))

My point here is you have to look at it as whether the all-together effect makes the site better or worse. So if you consider how the site is now just an unmoderated help room... .

Also, FYI, I remember an older discussion about how a 30% accept rate was considered decent.

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CanisLupus · Jul 23, 2017 at 09:54 AM 0

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Hi Owen, thank you for answering. I'm glad to know it has some positive effects, though I can't help but wonder why. :) I mean, it's probably people newer to the site who post comment-like answers, so those people are very likely not even aware of the stat to avoid doing so (I think!). StackOverflow for example, doesn't implement such a feature, but then again SO has a lot of moderation in its culture; sometimes too much.

I really think the greatest negative effect is it giving old answers an unfair advantage. I remember seeing a few answers that are now not correct for the current version of Unity (for example regarding C++ plugins being only on Pro, or lesser details that were rendered invalid). I suspect that the stat may be a source of some old questions not having better and up to date answers, though I don't have any data to back my fears.

Likewise, even though - if you think about it - 30% answers accepted is good enough as a site average (maybe?), at first glance it doesn't seem too good, because 2 out of 3 answers you make the effort of posting aren't getting accepted. If you don't care or don't know about the stat, yeah, it doesn't make a difference. If you are a bit OCD, like me, it does! I know rationally that it doesn't matter, but it's there and I'm not pleased with it decreasing. :)

[Meta] What is the purpose of the "Percent Correct" answers on a user profile? Maybe remove it?

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