The phrase "a poor model for" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe something that is not an effective or suitable example for a particular purpose or context.
Example: "The outdated textbook is a poor model for modern teaching methods."
Alternatives: "an inadequate example of" or "a subpar representation of".
Charles had a son, about 16, and he always feared he was a poor model for him.
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.
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.
Humans aren't slow, dumb and heading for the evolutionary scrapheap; machine efficiency is a very poor model indeed for understanding ourselves; and cutting people out of every possible loop – the better to assure speed, profit, protection or military success – is a poor model for a future in which humans and machines equally maximise their capabilities.
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.
The adjusted Cassisi B model displayed a good model fit for the CFI and TLI, a marginal model fit for the RMSEA, and a poor model fit for the NFI.
The adjusted Cassisi A and adjusted Shin models displayed a poor model fit for the CFI, NFI, TLI, and RMSEA.
The low level of synteny between dicot and monocot plants makes Arabidopsis a poor model system for exploring cereals [ 5].
However, model validation revealed a poor model fit for SSFs of wolves moving to kill sites (Table 4), and we are therefore unable to conclude whether and how wolves chose kill sites in relation to human infrastructure.
