Hi Chris:
I see this issue at several levels of administration. A related issue is how values are assigned to become targets. We have a small but successful MA program in experimental psychology. (Success being defined as both admission into PhD programs and people realizing that they do not want to continue in experimental psychology.) We are under consideration for closing or some other similar fate because we are smaller than other graduate programs. Our program operates on a mentor model, with a student paired with a faculty member, unlike the programs to which we are compared. When we ask why we need to increase enrollment and graduation counts then the reply is that the value is the target number. When we ask who and how was that value decided upon then we get silence.
Ken --------------------------------------------------------------- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. [email protected] Professor & Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --------------------------------------------------------------- On 2/17/2013 12:15 PM, Christopher Green wrote:
Someone was asking about mandated graduation rates of 100% the other day. Here's a little Sunday-morning insight that I thought you might find interesting. I just ran across this thing called Goodhart's Law, the popular form of which is "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law Although it is usually applied to business and gov't, it occurred to me that it applies to all kind of issues in education as well. For instance, when the gov't starts measuring the "success "of universities on the bases of retention and completion, most of what then happens is that universities start retaining and graduating people who would not have been retained before (and the value of grades and degrees is thus debased). We don't talk about it that way, of course; we spend a lot of time and money developing systems (both physical and social) that are claimed to help those who would not have stayed and finished otherwise, but this ignores the ugly but undeniable fact that university is hard and some people decide that it is not for them. But it is hard for them to know that it is not for them before they have done it for a year or two. So, to summarize, the gov't sets targets, and we set up systems to meet the targets. Some students may be truly helped, but to the exact degree that those systems fail to bring EVERYONE up to level, we retain and graduate students we wouldn't have before in order to meet the targets anyway (otherwise we are considered "failures"). That is, as per Goodhart's Law, as soon as passing the test (the retention and completion quotas) becomes the chief aim, the test fails to measure whether things are actually getting better or worse. It becomes just another part of the system to be navigated. Chris ....... Christopher D Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M6C 1G4 [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://www.yorku.ca/christo
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