Critics of forced ranking have often focused their attacks on the principle of ranking, which they decry as brutal, inhumane, and ultimately counterproductive. Whether or not you accept these arguments, the fatal flaw of forced ranking is not the “ranking,” but the “forced.” Whenever judgments are forced onto an inappropriate scale, either because a relative scale is used to measure an absolute performance or because judges are forced to distinguish the indistinguishable, the choice of the scale mechanically adds noise.
