Jacquelyn Martin/AP
This post is adapted from "Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy" by Cathy O'Neil.
In 1983, a struggling news magazine, US News & World Report, decided to undertake an ambitious project.
It would evaluate 1,800 colleges and universities throughout the United States and rank them for excellence.
At first, the staff relied on opinion surveys.
They were barraged with complaints from alumni and administrators that the rankings were unfair. All the magazine had to do was look at the data, they said.
So the editors spent the next several years figuring out what they could measure.
They had no direct way to quantify how a four-year process affected one single student, much less tens of millions of them. They couldn’t measure learning, happiness, confidence, friendships, or other aspects of a student’s four-year experience.
President Lyndon Johnson’s ideal for higher education—“a way to deeper personal fulfillment, greater personal productivity and increased personal reward”—didn’t fit into their model.
Instead they picked proxies that seemed to correlate with success.
A Saudi university beat MIT by gaming the system. Brian Snyder/Reuters
They looked at SAT scores, student-teacher ratios, and acceptance rates. They analyzed the percentage of incoming freshmen who made it to sophomore year and the percentage of those who graduated. They calculated the percentage of living alumni who contributed money to their alma mater, surmising that if they gave a college money there was a good chance they appreciated the education there.
Three-quarters of the ranking would be produced by an algorithm—an opinion formalized in code—that incorporated these proxies. In the other quarter, they would factor in the subjective views of college officials throughout the country.
U.S. News’s first data-driven ranking came out in 1988, and the results seemed sensible. However, as the ranking grew into a national standard, a vicious feedback loop materialized. The trouble was that the rankings were self-reinforcing.
If a college fared badly in U.S. News, its reputation would suffer, and conditions would deteriorate.
Top students would avoid it, as would top professors. Alumni would howl and cut back on contributions. The ranking would tumble further. The ranking, in short, was destiny.
As the rankings grow, so do efforts to game them.
In a 2014 U.S. News ranking of global universities, the mathematics department at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz University landed in seventh place, right behind Harvard. The department had been around for only two years but had somehow leapfrogged ahead of several giants of mathematics, including Cambridge and MIT.
At first blush, this might look like a positive development.
Perhaps MIT and Cambridge were coasting on their fame while a hardworking insurgent powered its way into the elite. With a pure reputational ranking, such a turnaround would take decades. But data can bring surprises to the surface in a hurry.
Algorithms, though, can also be gamed.
Lior Pachter, a computational biologist at Berkeley, looked into it.
He found that the Saudi university had contacted a host of mathematicians whose work was highly cited and had offered them $72,000 to serve as adjunct faculty.
The deal, according to a recruiting letter Pachter posted on his blog, stipulated that the mathematicians had to work three weeks a year in Saudi Arabia. The university would fly them there in business class and put them up at a five-star hotel.
Conceivably, their work in Saudi Arabia added value locally. But the university also required them to change their affiliation on the Thomson Reuters academic citation website, a key reference for the U.S. News rankings.
That meant the Saudi university could claim the publications of their new adjunct faculty as its own.
And since citations were one of the algorithm’s primary inputs, King Abdulaziz University soared in the rankings.
Adapted from"Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy." Copyright © 2016 by Cathy O’Neil. Published by Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
