Afriend got in touch recently to talk about a video exposé he’d seen about university league-table rankings.
Admittedly, this tells you something about my friends, and the kinds of conversations we have, but nevertheless, the video had been eyebrow-raising for him. It was his final question that got me though: so are there any good metrics?
From my PhD on data and education, in a school context, I learnt that metrics in most systems are gameable, that avoiding perverse incentives is hard, but that metrics can provide more-or-less good proxies for the things they purport to tell you about.
