Data 6 — Make One That Lies
Rung 6 · what you make it say · two periods · terminal rung
The strand's last rung, and the only one where the student is on the other side of the chart.
Build a visualisation that is technically true and genuinely misleading. Then build the honest one from the same data. Then say what you changed and why it worked.
The rules, and they are not negotiable
1. Every number must be real and traceable. Four-part source test from Data 5, attached.
2. No value may be altered, invented, or dropped. Not one.
3. The lie is made only of framing. The five levers from Data 3 — baseline, denominator, bin, order, encoding — plus the title, the selection of what to include, and the choice of proxy from Data 2.
That constraint is the entire pedagogy. Anybody can lie by making up numbers, and that teaches nothing. What a student needs to see is that a chart with no false data in it anywhere can still walk a reader to a conclusion the data does not support — because that is the kind they will actually be shown for the rest of their lives.
The two deliverables, submitted together
| A. The persuasive chart | technically true, aimed at a conclusion |
| B. The honest chart | same data, same source, drawn for the reader's question |
Plus the confession, one paragraph:
Which levers did you pull, in order. What did the reader see first. What did you count on them not checking.
A and B are graded together and neither counts alone. A submission with only the persuasive chart is not the assignment; a submission with only the honest chart is a different, easier assignment.
The swap
Charts go to another table with the confession removed.
Name the lever without being told.
Two things come out of this reliably, and both are worth having:
- Some tables cannot find it. That is the most useful outcome in the lesson. A chart that fooled a room full of people who knew a chart in that room was built to fool them is a demonstration nothing else in the curriculum can produce.
- Some tables find a lever the author did not pull. Also useful, and it is the Data 1 bucket cap arriving again: a reader hunting for manipulation will find some. Whether the author intended it does not settle whether it misleads.
The turn
Do not skip this and do not soften it. It is the reason the lesson runs last.
You just did that in forty minutes, with real numbers, with no training.
Every chart you are shown for the rest of your life was made by somebody who can also do it — and most of them are not doing it on purpose. A chart is made of choices, and somebody who has never thought about the choices still makes all five of them.
That is the distinction the whole strand has been building toward, and it is why Data 1 caps the JUNK bucket at two: most misleading charts are not lies. They are unexamined choices, made by someone who wanted their point to land. Including, from today, the student.
Where the ethics attaches
Do not run this as a standalone stunt. It has two natural homes and each changes the lesson:
Year 11, IS2, inside RISK / ETHICS. The ethics unit has the framework, the six lenses, and the scandal project; RISK is paired with it on the Master sheet and currently has no material. Applying the six ethical lenses to "I made a true chart that misled a reader" is a genuinely contested case with no settled answer, which is what the unit's strongest material is made of.
Year 12, IS3, at the front of the capstone StoryMap. The senior is about to spend six weeks building an argument out of maps and charts, for a stakeholder who "doesn't speak GIS" and therefore cannot audit any of it. This is the lesson that makes that recommendation honest, and it should run before the StoryMap is started, not after it is graded.
The senior framing is one sentence:
Your client cannot check your work. That is what makes this a professional obligation rather than a style preference.
The risk, named
This teaches a real capability to a real teenager. That is deliberate, and it is managed by three things in the design rather than by a warning:
- The honest chart is required in the same submission, so the capability never ships alone.
- The confession is required, so the technique is made explicit rather than absorbed.
- It runs last, after five lessons of being on the receiving end.
A student who meets this on rung 6 has spent the whole strand being misled by other people's charts first. That order is the safeguard.
Assessment
Critical Analysis rubric. This is the strand's high-water mark and it reaches most of the instrument:
- ORIGINAL — construction, and there is no right answer to converge on
- SKEPTICAL — the swap is skepticism under adversarial conditions
- PROFOUND — available in the confession, if the student is honest about what they counted on the reader not checking
- WIDE ANGLE — the turn, if the student can state what it means that most misleading charts are not deliberate
- CONTRASTING — A against B, built into the deliverable
PROFOUND should not be given for a slick chart. It is for the confession.
Open
- Does this run in IS2, IS3, or both? Both is defensible — ethics case in year 11, professional obligation in year 12 — but only if the year-12 run uses the capstone's own data rather than repeating the exercise.
- Whether the persuasive charts should be kept and shown to next year's Data 1 is worth deciding. A student-made chart in the deck would be the strongest slide in it, and it raises a consent question the class should answer for itself.