Using Confounds As a Last Resort to Help Our Case

Properly understanding confounding factors can help us understand things better. And sometimes, we can make up or exaggerate the presence of certain counfounding factors to help our case. However, unless we have data to back up out claims, this isn't often successful. For example, I could never quite convince my Statistics professors to better my grades, even I when tried to make the case that my poor study habits and arithmetic errors were counfounding my abilty to demonstrate my grasp of the material, which I really thought was quite good.