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Evaluate College Impact on Income: Address Bias and Validity

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates competency in critiquing observational study design and analysis, including recognition of sampling bias and external validity issues, regression model assumptions, confounding, diagnostic reasoning, and the distinction between descriptive and causal inference.

  • medium
  • Google
  • Analytics & Experimentation
  • Data Scientist

Evaluate College Impact on Income: Address Bias and Validity

Company: Google

Role: Data Scientist

Category: Analytics & Experimentation

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Technical Screen

##### Scenario Studying whether attending college affects income using data from 1,000 Mountain View residents. ##### Question Is fitting a simple linear regression with a binary college variable appropriate? Discuss sampling bias, model validity, and propose better analytic alternatives. ##### Hints Consider external validity and two-sample t-tests or multivariate models.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates competency in critiquing observational study design and analysis, including recognition of sampling bias and external validity issues, regression model assumptions, confounding, diagnostic reasoning, and the distinction between descriptive and causal inference.

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Google
Jul 12, 2025, 6:59 PM
Data Scientist
Technical Screen
Analytics & Experimentation
20
0

Study Setup

You have an observational, cross-sectional dataset of 1,000 adult Mountain View residents. The outcome is individual annual income (pre-tax). The exposure is a binary indicator of having completed a 4-year college degree (College = 1 if yes, 0 otherwise).

Question

Is fitting a simple linear regression of income on a binary college indicator appropriate for this data? Discuss:

  1. Sampling bias and external validity.
  2. Model validity and assumptions (distributional form, confounding, diagnostics).
  3. Better analytic alternatives for both descriptive and causal goals.

Solution

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