The phrase "a poor model" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe something that is not effective or inadequate in representing or simulating a particular concept or system.
Example: "The research relied on a poor model that failed to accurately predict the outcomes of the experiment."
Alternatives: "an inadequate model" or "a subpar model".
Charles had a son, about 16, and he always feared he was a poor model for him.
The overwhelming scholarly assessment is that the ruling in Bush v. Gore is a poor model of judicial reasoning.
It also helps children who speak Somali at home but have a poor model of the language because they are also being taught English by their parents".
The usual two-dimensional culture of cells on petri dishes has proven to be a poor model of three-dimensional tissues.
While the police sometimes pay for information and a judge might mitigate the sentence of a talkative offender, the criminal-justice system is a poor model for the classroom.
He now believes that his performance was in questionable taste — too showy, and a poor model of behavior for students who might imitate him — and says that he'll think twice before doing it again.
In our politically charged era, most Americans Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike seem to be able to agree on one thing: in recent years, Congress has been a poor model of negotiation behavior.
Rabbit is the most commonly used animal species in intravitreal pharmacokinetics, but it has been criticized as being a poor model of human eye.
Male rats sometimes eat their young rather than nurture them, which makes them a poor model for studying how fatherhood affects the brains of species that frown on infanticide.
In their book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), von Neumann and Morgenstern asserted that the mathematics developed for the physical sciences, which describes the workings of a disinterested nature, was a poor model for economics.
We argue that while ordinary Turing machines (TMs) are a poor model for a kind of feedback that the closed-loop approach to neuroscience highlights, suitably modified TMs are a better fit.
