“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” When the population you are trying to sort becomes larger than the ability to discover value

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” When the population you are trying to sort becomes larger than the ability to discover value, you rely on values that are given to you. Your argument is valid. Once the population grows to that level you can only do that. You need objective criteria. But we all know that objective criteria is bad. We know that the teachers are teaching to the test. We know the students are cramming and forgetting. We know that tutors bring up the results of students by one standard deviation. Perhaps we should rethink this. Maybe instead of greedily taking the largest population we can go through, we should stick to what we can evaluate and simply take the best from that pile? Nah forget it, we just found a new metric that the students aren't gaming yet! We're just going to use that, that will work forever.