Kappa is an index that considers observed agreement with respect to a baseline agreement. However, investigators must consider carefully whether Kappa's baseline agreement is relevant for the particular research question. Kappa's baseline is frequently described as the agreement due to chance, which is only partially correct. Kappa's baseline agreement is the agreement that would be expected due to random allocation, given the quantities specified by the marginal totals of square contingency table. Thus, Kappa = 0 when the observed allocation is apparently random, regardless of the quantity disagreement as constrained by the marginal totals. However, for many applications, investigators should be more interested in the quantity disagreement in the marginal totals than in the allocation disagreement as described by the additional information on the diagonal of the square contingency table. Thus for many applications, Kappa's baseline is more distracting than enlightening. Consider the following example: