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To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades

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Re: To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades

#31

Post by Perdition »

arethuza wrote: post #12
jedberg wrote: post #5

So War Games was right then... We really do need to replace the officers with computers.

The Soviets did have an automated system that could launch their missiles automatically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_%28nuclear_war%29 It may still be operational, but not normally turned on - for obvious reasons.... At the other end of the spectrum the UK has no automated control preventing unauthorized launches (no Permissive Action Locks) and we check to see whether Radio 4 is still broadcast to detect…

In reality that system was not mechanically/electronically automated, it just enabled a team of officers in a bunker to give a general launch order without contact with the leadership. And the launch orders would still need to be manually carried out by the crews of strategic missile assets.

It was a hedge against a decapitation strike and the chaos that would result in the Soviet military due to its officers habitual deference to central authority.

Re: To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades

#32

Post by sitkack »

mathattack wrote: post #25
hliyan wrote: post #4

In other words, you get what you measure. This is one of the reasons I discourage measuring team performance in terms of bug counts or lines-of-code. The former lead to what some call "issue-tennis" and informal fixes, and the latter lead to code bloat. After years of trying, I've finally concluded that "key performance indicators" attached to individuals or teams (as opposed to artifacts and periods) usually leads t…

Here's the obligatory Dilbert -> http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/ This sounds like a cheating problem, not a measuring problem. The same things happens when people try to measure schools. My sense is you can't give up on measuring things, because you can't scale an organization without metrics. You just have to balance them with understanding what is really going on. Or rather you need to have the metrics…

What metrics does an ant hill use?

Re: To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades

#33

Post by golemotron »

mathattack wrote: post #25
hliyan wrote: post #4

In other words, you get what you measure. This is one of the reasons I discourage measuring team performance in terms of bug counts or lines-of-code. The former lead to what some call "issue-tennis" and informal fixes, and the latter lead to code bloat. After years of trying, I've finally concluded that "key performance indicators" attached to individuals or teams (as opposed to artifacts and periods) usually leads t…

Here's the obligatory Dilbert -> http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/ This sounds like a cheating problem, not a measuring problem. The same things happens when people try to measure schools. My sense is you can't give up on measuring things, because you can't scale an organization without metrics. You just have to balance them with understanding what is really going on. Or rather you need to have the metrics…

You can't give up on measuring things, but you don't have to let people know what you are measuring or make the measure materially to them. That's there the trouble starts.

Re: To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades

#34

Post by jessaustin »

sitkack wrote: post #32
mathattack wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the obligatory Dilbert -> http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/ This sounds like a cheating problem, not a measuring problem. The same things happens when people try to measure schools. My sense is you can't give up on measuring things, because you can't scale an organization without metrics. You just have to balance them with understanding what is really going on. Or rather you need to have the metrics…

What metrics does an ant hill use?

I believe the current consensus is that KPIs are communicated via pheromones. Both the location and density of pheromones are meaningful to the decision-making process of an individual ant. The large-scale behavior of the colony is a result of the totality of those decisions.

You make an unfair comparison, however. Numerous factors that constrain ant behavior (brain size, genetics, sterility, energy requirements, etc.) simply do not obtain for an organization of unrelated human beings.

Re: To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades

#35

Post by calinet6 »

hliyan wrote: post #4

In other words, you get what you measure. This is one of the reasons I discourage measuring team performance in terms of bug counts or lines-of-code. The former lead to what some call "issue-tennis" and informal fixes, and the latter lead to code bloat. After years of trying, I've finally concluded that "key performance indicators" attached to individuals or teams (as opposed to artifacts and periods) usually leads t…

Absolutely. In attempting to solve the problem of the influence of testing, they've also taken a huge step toward improving quality.

This applies to all of us.

http://blog.deming.org/2013/02/the-idea-of-performance-ratin...

Re: To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades

#36

Post by hibikir »

Perdition wrote: post #29
mathattack wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the obligatory Dilbert -> http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/ This sounds like a cheating problem, not a measuring problem. The same things happens when people try to measure schools. My sense is you can't give up on measuring things, because you can't scale an organization without metrics. You just have to balance them with understanding what is really going on. Or rather you need to have the metrics…

The problem isn't measurement, it is tying rewards to achieving certain measurements. People will do what you reward them for doing, even if that isn't what you actually wanted them to do. The real issue is that identifying the correct things to measure and reward is really, really hard. I read once about a factory that was trying to improve output so they started rewarding shifts of workers for reaching production g…

I have a good book on the subject: Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations.

The TL;DR version is that any job worth doing has some hard to measure components, so the best you will get using measures as incentives is to lag in the hard to measure parts. So the recommendation is not to stop measuring, but to make individual measurements invisible to management, and be just tools that people can use to improve their own performance. If your team is doing far worse than average in a measurement that you all find important, you will work on it anyway.

Re: To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades

#37

Post by protonfish »

616c wrote: post #23
hliyan wrote: post #4

In other words, you get what you measure. This is one of the reasons I discourage measuring team performance in terms of bug counts or lines-of-code. The former lead to what some call "issue-tennis" and informal fixes, and the latter lead to code bloat. After years of trying, I've finally concluded that "key performance indicators" attached to individuals or teams (as opposed to artifacts and periods) usually leads t…

So I was in language courses in Cairo for a while. I was the only language major; all the other students were students from my university in a specialized diplomacy and government service track. Unlike me, they had to pass language proficiency exams, in a language of their choosing, or they did not graduate until they did. So, I had a great teacher. He did not care about grades at all. He would give bad grades, and w…

I graded like this when I taught community college and most students hated it. What surprised me is that it was not enough for a student to get an "A" - they wanted better grades than the other students, like it was a competition.

Re: To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades

#38

Post by ck2 »

chiph wrote: post #30
ck2 wrote: post #28

We're pretty much guaranteed to have a nuclear accident at this point. If ditching the grades is the answer to cheating, I say ditch nuclear weapons to solve nuclear problems.

You go first.

Half the world doesn't have nuclear weapons, they seem to be doing just fine http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-weapon-free_zone

Re: To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades

#39

Post by Spooky23 »

mathattack wrote: post #25
hliyan wrote: post #4

In other words, you get what you measure. This is one of the reasons I discourage measuring team performance in terms of bug counts or lines-of-code. The former lead to what some call "issue-tennis" and informal fixes, and the latter lead to code bloat. After years of trying, I've finally concluded that "key performance indicators" attached to individuals or teams (as opposed to artifacts and periods) usually leads t…

Here's the obligatory Dilbert -> http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/ This sounds like a cheating problem, not a measuring problem. The same things happens when people try to measure schools. My sense is you can't give up on measuring things, because you can't scale an organization without metrics. You just have to balance them with understanding what is really going on. Or rather you need to have the metrics…

Measurement isn't the problem, it was the interpretation of the measurement.

They would apply the scores to the metrics used to determine suitability for promotion, probably because there isn't much you can measure to measure the performance of a guy who sits in a hole all day.

Re: To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades

#40

Post by TeMPOraL »

protonfish wrote: post #37
616c wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I was in language courses in Cairo for a while. I was the only language major; all the other students were students from my university in a specialized diplomacy and government service track. Unlike me, they had to pass language proficiency exams, in a language of their choosing, or they did not graduate until they did. So, I had a great teacher. He did not care about grades at all. He would give bad grades, and w…

I graded like this when I taught community college and most students hated it. What surprised me is that it was not enough for a student to get an "A" - they wanted better grades than the other students, like it was a competition.

Because it always is. First there are parents, who want their kids to be above average / top of the class. Kids mindsets then turns to competition, as students themselves start to evaluate each other by their grades. And somewhere in the middle of this the system starts throwing in various scholarships and other perks for a fixed number of best students. No wonder people treat it like competition, because it is one.
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