Human judgment, held accountable

Bring human judgment back into teaching, hiring, and testing, and hold it accountable with recordings, appeals, public records, and ratings tied to real results.

In plain words

Over the last century, one reasonable rule at a time, we replaced human judgment with regulations and standards. It curbed real abuse. But we threw the baby out with the bathwater. A skilled person watching you work can see what no bubble sheet will. For most of history, trusting a person's judgment meant trusting it blindly. Now every exam can be recorded for almost nothing and every examiner's calls compared with what happened afterward. The real choice is between judgment nobody can check and judgment everybody can.

Evidence and sources

• Zero-tolerance discipline showed no evidence of making schools safer and fell hardest on minority students. American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, American Psychologist 63, no. 9 (2008).
• "Metric fixation." Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton University Press, 2018).
• Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense (Random House, 1995).
• Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Wording from Marilyn Strathern, European Review 5, no. 3 (1997).

Questions this answers

• Are human examiners more biased than standardized tests?
• What is Goodhart's Law in education?
• Do zero-tolerance policies work?
• How do you make human judgment fair?

In the book

In Four Weeks, Not Four Years: Chapters 5, 9, 10, 11.

Read the full answers

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