The Tyranny of Metrics

by Jerry Z. Muller

Gaming through creaming. This takes place when practitioners find simpler targets or prefer clients with less challenging circumstances, making it easier to reach the metric goal, but excluding cases where success is more difficult to achieve. Improving numbers by lowering standards. One way of improving metric scores is by lowering the criteria for scoring. Thus, for example, graduation rates of high schools and colleges can be increased by lowering the standards for passing. Or airlines improve their on-time performance by increasing the scheduled flying time of their flights. Improving numbers through omission or distortion of data. This strategy involves leaving out inconvenient instances, or classifying cases in a way that makes them disappear from the metrics. Police forces can “reduce” crime rates by booking felonies as misdemeanors, or by deciding not to book reported crimes at all. Cheating. One step beyond gaming the metrics is cheating—a phenomenon whose frequency tends to increase directly with the stakes of the metric in question. As we’ll see, as the No Child Left Behind Act raised the stakes for schools of the test scores of their pupils, teachers and principals in many cities responded by altering students’ answers on the test.