Q31 of The Afternoon Mock Exam for Dec 11 candidates, makes a strange claim about estimator consistency increasing with increasing sample size. I’m not allowed to quote the question without violating CFA rules but does anyone else find the explanation of why B is correct to be unsatisfactory? Surely an estimator is either consistent or it is not, there is no measure of consistency. Sorry for the double post, can’t figure out how to delete a post only edit one.
Haven’t done the mock yet so do not know the specifics. I do recall though that in this context as sample sizes increase, the sample parameter converges on the population parameter. I guess in this context consistency refers to closely reflecting the population parameter.
thanks C3Po, I’m with you on that but the question in the mock is asking something a bit differently. Now I am by no means an expert on probability, but I do have a mathematics degree and in my previous studies (and in most Prob and Analysis textbooks) consistency means something close to the definiition in the note but completely different to the explanation in the mock exam solutions, the quant methods sections seems to have a lot of questions and answers based around a loose and wooly notion of the topics covered with a number of technically incorrect statements. For instance two of the options in the Hypothesis testing question state “accept the null hypothesis…” now we know you can never accept the hypothesis, you merely fail to reject it. Admittedly these options aren’t the correct answer but the solutions don’t use this aspect of their incorrectness to decide upon the right answer.