Essay on university rankings and cognitive prediction without actionable leads

100 Teaching Minds U.S. News and World Report's annual rankings weigh heavily on the minds of the faculty and administration of universities who are in the prestige game. These rankings are based on numbers: average SAT scores of admitted students, average rank in class of admitted students, faculty publications, and many other numbers that come out in favor of research universities with world-class faculty. But world-class fac- ulty means faculty who care about research and not about teaching. While there certainly is no harm in going to Harvard or Yale, the suc- cess of their students hardly depends on what they learned in those places and depends a great deal more on the fact that the best and the brightest are the ones who go there in the first place. These places get away with teaching courses in obscure issues in literature and history, or in economic theory or in complex math- ematics, by pretending that they are really teaching students to think. But does knowing obscure information necessarily imply that one is a good thinker? A good thinker, I claim, would be good at each of the 12 cognitive processes. What does it mean to be good at prediction, for example? Is a 2-year-old good at prediction? Is a dog good at prediction? Is a profes- sional gambler good at prediction? Is a stock trader good at predic- tion? Is a mother of a toddler good at prediction? Is a politician good at prediction? Is a scientist good at prediction? We actually are quite good at assessing the ability of others at pre- diction precisely because we have data to support our conclusions. We know how good gamblers or stock traders are at predicting. If they are very successful, we can say they are brilliant at what they do, or we can say they are lucky. Those are our choices. The same is true of scientists. Most scientists make predictions, and those that are proven right are seen as brilliant. Luck enters into science as well and quite often scientists say that a given Nobel Prize winner was lucky and isn’t really all that bright. Dogs are seen as being smart (for a dog) when they can correctly predict the arrival of their master or bad weather or threats, and are seen as stupid when they bark at thunder. Their behavior is seen as stupid precisely because of the erroneous prediction that barking will scare the thunder away. A dog’s inability to predict is exactly why we think dogs are dumb animals, and when they surprise us with an ac- curate prediction, they are seen as smart. Of course, we don’t expect dogs to predict who will win the big game. We know their limitations. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023846