On 98% accuracy

The owner of Digital Sermon Transcription recently realized that her promise of "98% accuracy" means that, since the average sermon is 6000 words, one can make a LOT of mistakes and still make the standard. She is changing her standard to 99.9%.

It occurs to me that one way to look at this would be that 98% accuracy means that one could easily make six errors in the Ten Commandments (the list in Exodus is 313 words long) and still be 98% accurate. One could even just leave out the 6 words one liked the least. As an example, one could take the "nots" out of the last 5 commandments and still be well within the 98% accuracy standard. Ack!

Webmedx has a 98% minimum accuracy standard, but I always hate when I fall below 99%. It's very embarrassing. One can do a lot of damage even with just one error in 100 correctly transcribed words.