CAT 2018 Question Paper | Verbal Slot 2

CAT Questions

This is a question based on the general arguments made in the passage. Understanding the main idea of the passage and solving a wide variety of questions in your CAT Online Preparation is more important than anything else to ace the CAT Exam. Solving questions from CAT Previous Year Paper is the best starting point. Solve this question from CAT 2018 Question Paper Slot 2 and look at the answer explanation given below.

---

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 16 : Which of the following is NOT a consequence of the 'metric fixation' phenomenon mentioned in the passage?

1. Short-term orientation induced by frequent measurement of performance.
2. Finding a way to show better results without actually improving performance.
3. Improving cooperation among employees leading to increased organisational effectiveness in the long run.
4. Deviating from organisationally important objectives to measurable yet less important objectives.

---

---

Video Explanation

---

---

Explanatory Answer

Easy one. The passage focusses on the negative effects of metric fixation. Option 3 mentions ‘improved cooperation’ and ‘increased effectiveness in the long run’. The author does not mention these as a consequence of metric fixation in the passage.

We know that option 1 is true from paragraph 4 which discusses short-termism as a negative consequence of metric fixation. The problem mentioned in option 2 – finding a way to show better results without actually increasing performance—is discussed in paragraph 2. In paragraph 3, the author talks of the problem of deviation from organizationally important objectives to measurable yet less important objectives.

---

The question is " Which of the following is NOT a consequence of the 'metric fixation' phenomenon mentioned in the passage?"

Hence, the answer is Improving cooperation among employees leading to increased organisational effectiveness in the long run.

Choice C is the correct answer.