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Continuing our contributions from Students and Teachers, Daniela Alina Plewe, Lecturer at the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore offers these thoughts. Daniela teaches  Innovation Management

Evaluating Evaluations

What is the function of an educational system in a society? According to so called institutional economics, schools in the broadest sense guarantee the quality of performance and reduce the risks of failures for those who are certified by them. This is relevant for future employers as well as for society as a whole, structured by division of labor based on reliable and delivering participants. If we subscribe to these goals in this convenient vagueness – then how can we align our education systems towards reaching them?

Universities should be simulations and leave room to counterfactual explorations, apart from the constraints of reality and society in order to explore fruitful alternatives. They should allow curious minds to tackle intellectual and creative risks, both for students and for staff. Do we therefore need strict emphasis on measurements and key performance indicators? Do these guarantee desirable outcomes or suffocate initiatives and explorations? Are we over-obsessed with evaluations instead of devoting energy to progress? Do we have to lecture under the dictate of student feedback, and the imperative of first tier publications for example? (Various scientific communities observe a diminution in the quality of papers, since researchers avoid taking risks of audacious hypotheses in order to safely fulfill their performance indicators.)

Quantitative measures are efficient tools for collating information as in stock prices in order to let market participants bet on them. Are they the most effective tool to communicate pedagogical feedback or predicting someone’s performance – possibly no. Are we overrating their communicative power when we base most of our evaluations on them, gaining a feel-good character but sacrificing core principles of rationality such as the awareness and questioning of theoretical assumptions? Do they really generate the outcomes of comparability (aiming for some sort of “just judgment”) and – even if they do – do we need those actually in this narrow form? Philosophically speaking, no two situations are the same; comparability and predictability are never given. Not all risks can be mitigated. So measuring will not ultimately guarantee quality. Yes, we need codes and shortcuts to evaluate people, and quantitative measures serve well as such. But we should not take them as the “real thing”. Studies have shown that most self made millionaires – if one subscribes to this scale for a moment – were under average performing students.

The obsession with measures bears the danger of motivating people merely extrinsically. Having an answer to the question “what is important?” seems a much more powerful source of motivation than externally defined success criteria. Researchers, if student or staff, should know at anytime, where exactly they are navigating in the overall map of progress. Basics in the meta-discipline of Philosophy of Science reflecting all forms of enquiries may help here. The beauty of this big picture is the key to intrinsic motivation and desirable excellence.