Publish or Perish#

(Also This Course)#

The KPI regime, formalised#

Scholarship, subjected to the same instrumentation as any other output metric:

• citation count, as a proxy for impact
• impact, as a proxy for quality
• quality, as a proxy for whatever the citation count was already measuring

A closed loop, audited by itself, in triplicate.

Grade inflation: the identical mechanism, slower#

The rubric got longer. The grades got higher. Neither number tells you whether anyone learned more.

The self-audit (run this on your own workload)#

1. Take last year’s version of whatever you’re doing.
2. Count the steps it took.
3. Take this year’s version of the same thing.
4. Count the steps again.
5. If step 4 is bigger than step 2, and the outcome is the same outcome, you have found an instance. Cite the mechanism, not the feeling.

Where this syllabus sits in its own audit#

Applying the instrument above, to this document, honestly. Words per lecture, weeks 1 through 12:

79 · 58 · 103 · 63 · 72 · 55 · 70 · 69 · 67 · 65 · 55 · 98

The expected curve was a rise into week 8 and a decline after it. The measured curve peaks at week 3 and again at week 12 — the two plainest weeks on the syllabus. Week 8, the local maximum this slide was written to report, is a local dip.

One count fell while every other rose: the teaching team, three at the start, one now. It fell because one person covering all three roles set the baseline the other two were measured against — week 3’s 卷王, as a staffing outcome.

The escalation this course performs is real. It is in register, not in length, and its nearest case is whoever is running the audit. Reported as found: the instrument does not care which answer the author wanted.

Citation#

Geertz (1963); this slide deck (2027); whichever paper you’re not reading right now because you’re reading this instead.