CAT 2018 Question Paper | Verbal Slot 2

CAT Questions

This is a Medium-Hard difficulty level passage on ‘Metric Fixation’ that appeared in CAT 2018 Question Paper Slot 2. Understanding the main idea of the passage is crucial to solving the 5 questions that follow this passage. The very first question of this passage is slightly tricky in terms of understanding the question itself. Reading vigorously during your CAT Online Preparation alone can get you through. The CAT Exam in recent years has been testing only on your understanding of the passage or a sentence. Don’t lose your handle on that!

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More and more companies, government agencies, educational institutions and philanthropic organisations are today in the grip of a new phenomenon: ‘metric fixation’. The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is possible – and desirable – to replace professional judgment (acquired through personal experience and talent) with numerical indicators of comparative performance based upon standardised data (metrics); and that the best way to motivate people within these organisations is by attaching rewards and penalties to their measured performance.

The rewards can be monetary, in the form of pay for performance, say, or reputational, in the form of college rankings, hospital ratings, surgical report cards and so on. But the most dramatic negative effect of metric fixation is its propensity to incentivise gaming: that is, encouraging professionals to maximise the metrics in ways that are at odds with the larger purpose of the organisation. If the rate of major crimes in a district becomes the metric according to which police officers are promoted, then some officers will respond by simply not recording crimes or downgrading them from major offences to misdemeanours. Or take the case of surgeons. When the metrics of success and failure are made public – affecting their reputation and income – some surgeons will improve their metric scores by refusing to operate on patients with more complex problems, whose surgical outcomes are more likely to be negative. Who suffers? The patients who don’t get operated upon.

When reward is tied to measured performance, metric fixation invites just this sort of gaming. But metric fixation also leads to a variety of more subtle unintended negative consequences. These include goal displacement, which comes in many varieties: when performance is judged by a few measures, and the stakes are high (keeping one’s job, getting a pay rise or raising the stock price at the time that stock options are vested), people focus on satisfying those measures – often at the expense of other, more important organisational goals that are not measured. The best-known example is ‘teaching to the test’, a widespread phenomenon that has distorted primary and secondary education in the United States since the adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Short-termism is another negative. Measured performance encourages what the US sociologist Robert K Merton in 1936 called ‘the imperious immediacy of interests where the actor’s paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes consideration of further or other consequences’. In short, advancing short-term goals at the expense of long-range considerations. This problem is endemic to publicly traded corporations that sacrifice long-term research and development, and the development of their staff, to the perceived imperatives of the quarterly report.

Question 15 : Of the following, which would have added the least depth to the author’s argument?

1. An analysis of the reasons why metrics fixation is becoming popular despite its drawbacks.
2. A comparative case study of metrics- and non-metrics-based evaluation, and its impact on the main goals of an organisation.
3. More real-life illustrations of the consequences of employees and professionals gaming metrics-based performance measurement systems.
4. Assessment of the pros and cons of a professional judgment-based evaluation system.

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Video Explanation

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Explanatory Answer

This question is worded trickily. We need to pick the option that adds the least depth to the author’s argument. What is the author’s argument? That metric fixation has a number of negative consequences. We need to look for an option that either goes against or does very little to improve the author’s position.

Would option 1—an analysis of the reasons why metrics fixation is becoming popular despite drawbacks—support or improve the author’s argument? Only a little, as this not the author’s main idea.

Would option 2—a comparative case study of metrics and non-metrics-based evaluation, and its impact on the main goals of an organization—help? Yes, it would. It could help the author show that with non-metrics-based evaluation, important but not measurable goals are worked upon.

Option 3 talks of more real-life illustrations of the consequences of employees and professionals gaming metrics-based performance measurement systems. The author already mentions police officers and surgeons in the passage. More examples would simply be superfluous, not adding much to the passage.

Option 4 talks of an assessment of the pros and cons of a professional judgment-based evaluation system. This is somewhat similar to option 2. It would help strengthen the author’s argument.

Between options 1 and 3, option 1 expands on a tangential idea, while 3 is unnecessary, as it works on a point the author has already covered in the passage. A close choice with option 3 winning as it adds the least depth, being superfluous.

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The question is "Of the following, which would have added the least depth to the author’s argument?"

Hence, the answer is More real-life illustrations of the consequences of employees and professionals gaming metrics-based performance measurement systems.

Choice C is the correct answer.

 

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