Scrutable

Not a graph, but has a well considered bad element KO

Can't post the graph because the actual content is confidential, but actually it would be sufficiently bewildering not to give much away.

A supposedly high level professional body (let's call them the "Royal College of Graphical Incompetents") has released the results of an exam in the form of a histogram, with comparative data covering the last 5 years.

The left Y axis is helpfully labelled "Axis Title". The percentage of candidates passing is added as a second Y axis, but, plainly exhausted by their efforts labelling the left Y axis, they don't label the right Y axis at all. They calculate this percentage no matter how many candidates sat the exam, or which sitting it was. So for a main sit, say 50 candidates sit the exam and 45 pass it. Fair enough, you can say that 90% passed it. But at the first resit, only 3 candidate sit it, and only one passes - it's a resit after all, so they aren't the best candidates. That's calculated as a 33% pass rate, shown as a data point on the right axis scale, and the points are joined up, so the 'trend' is a crazy zigzag line. Oh, with gaps, where no candidates sat the exam, which makes it visually uninterpretable.

It may just be me, but I also like time to increase from left to right on a graph, so the most recent time is on the right. But no, time decreases from left to right.

I might be having a word with the regulator, with this post as a practice run.