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Statistical forward looking models proposed by a guy who works in finance? How could that ever go wrong :) EDIT: More seriously, if it's already impossible t

by jbooth 16y ago

Statistical forward looking models proposed by a guy who works in finance? How could that ever go wrong :) EDIT: More seriously, if it's already impossible to measure, I fail to see how more complicated metrics would do anything but do an even worse job of measuring. There might be exceptions to this rule in a few cases but it's generally the way things work.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
The VAM metric (which is not very complicated) measures teacher performance by excluding student quality as a causative factor. If you have low quality students, who are only expected to score at the 25% level, and you boost them up to 35%, you win. If you have high quality students expected to reach 75%, but the only achieve 65%, you lose. Do you believe it's really that hard to predict that Asian kids in 2 parent $250k/year+ households will score higher than black kids in 1 grandparent $10-20k/year households? If you truly believe the effects of education are immeasurable, perhaps we should stop wasting money on it. We don't spend $859 billion on homeopathy for much the same reason.
- jbooth 16y ago
  Well, I'm pretty sure they're already doing something similar to that. And you consistently hear the best teachers complaining that by teaching to the test they're doing a worse job of teaching. Developer productivity is really hard to measure with universal statistics -- every attempt to do so has failed miserably and usually made things worse. Does that mean that nobody should spend money on development?
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    You should not hire developers if they have no measurable effect on your software quality/feature set/P&L. Incidentally, measuring developers is done routinely. Every bank (except maybe Citi) has a set of procedures and guidelines for outsourced development. These procedures make the process fairly predictable and they reduce costs/dependencies. Much like outsourced IT, teaching is repetitive grunt work. It can and should be defined and measured.
    - jbooth 16y ago
      Yeah, but the procedures are basically a whole bunch of subjective stuff added up. "Ok we're dividing this task into these subtasks, we're gonna put a deadline on each one and if you miss too many deadlines then we need to talk". That's way more fuzzy and subjective than a standardized test. You might sum up the subjective judgments in a quantitative way, but ultimately it's built on subjective assessments. Unless they're actually doing kloc or something.

by jbooth 16y ago

yummyfajitas 16y ago

The VAM metric (which is not very complicated) measures teacher performance by excluding student quality as a causative factor. If you have low quality students, who are only expected to score at the 25% level, and you boost them up to 35%, you win. If you have high quality students expected to reach 75%, but the only achieve 65%, you lose. Do you believe it's really that hard to predict that Asian kids in 2 parent $250k/year+ households will score higher than black kids in 1 grandparent $10-20k/year households? If you truly believe the effects of education are immeasurable, perhaps we should stop wasting money on it. We don't spend $859 billion on homeopathy for much the same reason.

jbooth 16y ago
Well, I'm pretty sure they're already doing something similar to that. And you consistently hear the best teachers complaining that by teaching to the test they're doing a worse job of teaching. Developer productivity is really hard to measure with universal statistics -- every attempt to do so has failed miserably and usually made things worse. Does that mean that nobody should spend money on development?
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  You should not hire developers if they have no measurable effect on your software quality/feature set/P&L. Incidentally, measuring developers is done routinely. Every bank (except maybe Citi) has a set of procedures and guidelines for outsourced development. These procedures make the process fairly predictable and they reduce costs/dependencies. Much like outsourced IT, teaching is repetitive grunt work. It can and should be defined and measured.
  - jbooth 16y ago
    Yeah, but the procedures are basically a whole bunch of subjective stuff added up. "Ok we're dividing this task into these subtasks, we're gonna put a deadline on each one and if you miss too many deadlines then we need to talk". That's way more fuzzy and subjective than a standardized test. You might sum up the subjective judgments in a quantitative way, but ultimately it's built on subjective assessments. Unless they're actually doing kloc or something.