Essay

Why Human Performance May Not Give a Useful Error Target

Question: Why can human performance be a poor guide for setting a target error rate in a system that reviews insurance claims or sorts customer support requests?

Sample answer: If people find the task difficult, their results may be too weak to serve as a useful reference point. In that case, human performance does not tell you what a strong system should achieve, so it becomes hard to estimate the best realistic error rate for the model.

Key points:

  • Humans may struggle with tasks such as claim review or support-request sorting
  • Weak human results are not a dependable baseline
  • Without a dependable baseline, the best achievable error rate is hard to estimate

Rubric: The essay should explain that when humans perform poorly, their performance is not a reliable benchmark, which makes the target error rate difficult to estimate, and it should use one of the given task examples or a comparable one.

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Updated 2026-08-12

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Machine Learning

Deep Learning

Supervised Learning

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Data Science

Machine Learning Strategy

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