You have missed the entire point of the article. Arbitrarily quantifying essentially qualitative measures is misleading (bordering on dishonest) and potentially

You have missed the entire point of the article. Arbitrarily quantifying essentially qualitative measures is misleading (bordering on dishonest) and potentially harmful, when these made-up numbers are then used to influence major decisions. E.g. these bogus college rankings are used to set immigration and other government policy in many countries: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/sep/10/university-rankings-influence-government-policy http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/201... The more operations you perform on these made-up numbers, like the "combination" you mention, the more authentic they might seem. But the result of averaging a bunch of made-up numbers is just as meaningless, if not more so.