Inquiry Brief Errors

When a misstatement is trivial and of no consequence, the targeted text is not misleading in spite of the error and the statement means more or less the same thing with the error as without the error. So, if the auditors had recalculated a mean, for example, and found it was 3.16 instead of the 3.06 reported in a table or in some text, it is probably the case that the targeted text would have the same meaning whether the mean is one or the other value. If the faculty claimed they are constructivists and it turns out in response to the auditors’ probe that they meant only that they are Piagetians, the statement is still acceptably accurate.

The errors, or misstatements, that are of consequence are those that alter the meaning of a targeted statement in the Inquiry Brief in such a way that the statement is not verified. If the Inquiry Brief asserts, for example, that the faculty endorsed the Brief at a particular faculty meeting, but the minutes of the meeting do not report the action, and/or a sample of faculty do not recall the endorsement or are unfamiliar with the contents of the Brief, the misstatement is of consequence and signifies that one part of the standard for faculty qualification in the TEAC system could not be confirmed (4.2.1). The evidence claimed for the endorsement, in other words, cannot be relied upon. If the recalculated mean (to take the example above) differed by more than 25% of the standard deviation from the reported mean, the misstatement of the mean is of consequence and the auditors would conclude that the reported and misstated mean was not confirmed and verified.


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