Re:Student Course Evaluations Get an 'F'
by jeangenie on Saturday September 27, 2014 @04:03AM
(#8376412)
Doesn't matter if it's big business or academia, shitty managers everywhere love bad metrics.
Re:Student Course Evaluations Get an 'F'
by vdaniuk on Saturday September 27, 2014 @02:02AM
(#8376219)
Humans are prone to generalisation, reducing complex objects or states to several numeric parameters is extremely useful. Full of errors and generalization errors, but nevertheless usefull.
Humanity will just have to build more complex models to quantify complex, dynamic objects, such as courses. There is nothing special in human interaction data that inherently prevents its quantification. We just need more data and more efficient algorithms.
It's funny how most of the good universities in the US started out as being explicitly Christian, but over the last couple centuries the Christianity has been pretty much wholesale replaced with numerology -- student grades, teacher evaluations, impact factors, statistical significance, etc. The entire system is built upon the worship of numbers, and every phenomenon is assigned some sort of numerical value (to of course be aggregated and statistically 'analyzed') even if it's plainly non-quantitative in nature.
You've got to wonder whether this is some sort of temporary societal blind spot, or whether this ideology is so toxic and so subtle and complex to refute that it will just be around forever as the endpoint of scientific history.