CAT 2018 Question Paper | Verbal Slot 2

CAT Questions

This is a question based on the example explained in the passage ‘Metric Fixation’ that appeared in the CAT 2018 Question Paper Slot 2. It is more than important to understand the purpose of the example, if any, used in the passage in order to understand the passage in a holistic manner. Develop a daily reading habit by reading articles from Bharath’s curated reading list. This makes your CAT Online Preparation journey more fun and help you crack the CAT Exam with an amazing percentile.

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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 17 : What main point does the author want to convey through the examples of the police officer and the surgeon?

1. Some professionals are likely to be significantly influenced by the design of performance measurement systems.
2. Metrics-linked rewards may encourage unethical behaviour among some professionals.
3. The actions of police officers and surgeons have a significantly impact on society.
4. Critical public roles should not be evaluated on metrics-based performance measures.

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Video Explanation

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Explanatory Answer

Slightly tricky one. To answer this, take a close look at paragraph 2. The author gives the examples of police officers and surgeons to explain how metric fixation may encourage professionals to maximize metrics ‘in ways that are at odds with the larger purpose’ of the organization. Option 2 captures this idea best.

Option 1 simply states that ‘some professionals’ are likely to be ‘significantly influenced’ by performance measurement systems. This misses the point. Option 3 states that the actions of police officers and surgeons have a ‘significant impact on society’. The impact police officers and surgeons have on the society is not the key idea here. Option 4 is close. But the focus of option 4 is on critical public roles. The author, however, does not specifically focus on professions that are of crucial importance to the general public. The author’s argument is more broad-based; it is about how metric fixation encourages the propensity to game the system. Option 2 is better than option 4.

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The question is "What main point does the author want to convey through the examples of the police officer and the surgeon?"

Hence, the answer is Metrics-linked rewards may encourage unethical behaviour among some professionals.

Choice B is the correct answer.