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> "You can't improve what you don't measure," sure, but the wrong things are being measured and the incentives are wrong and the consequences backwards. A dire
by bostik 12y ago
> "You can't improve what you don't measure," sure, but the wrong things are being measured and the incentives are wrong and the consequences backwards.
A direct corollary: you get what you measure. Nothing more, and nothing less.
In education and humans therein lies the problem. When all effort is expended towards hitting metrics, only the chosen metrics will be improved. Everything else is left to degrade. If you add the incentives to punish for not hitting the targets, of course you get cheating. A little at first, but when the improved goals are now set based on false data, you encourage a more systematic cheating.
One aspect of problem has been already witnessed in Finland, the country of supposedly superior education system. University staff are well aware of this but can do nothing about it. If I had to guess, I would say that the administators are simply divorced from reality.
I don't know if there is much cheating going on. We may not be that far down in the drain; what we do have, is a constant pressure to over-achieve. There are teachers and professors who all say same the same thing.
I wonder what happens when the researchers and teachers will get punished for not meeting their >100% performance targets year-over-year.
- Rapzid 12y agoMaybe broader tests with lower passing scores and weighted questions in very targeted areas?
- VLM 12y ago"I wonder what happens when the researchers and teachers will get punished for not meeting their >100% performance targets year-over-year." This is not considered a bug in the system, if we graduate more of them than we need, and as seen in the article cronyism and gang/mafia mentality is rampant. So in a system built on cheating, the "cooperative" will have their performance targets fixed, and the "non-team players" will be removed. Superficially the goal of standardized testing is to produce a populace thats real good at taking standardized tests, which is of course a totally useless goal, but its easy to measure. Slightly deeper, the goal of standardized testing is to remove autonomy from teachers as a punishment by forcing them to teach to the test. A bit deeper and the purpose of standardized testing is to encourage corruption. If one party has a political goal of fighting the teachers union, what better long term plan than to force them all to become thugs or leave? The other party likes it also, because who doesn't want an army of thugs? Nobody wants the kids to learn anything, unfortunately. Sometimes it happens accidentally, but it doesn't matter.