CAT 2018 Question Paper | Verbal Slot 2

CAT Questions

Here is an unorthodox reading comprehension question that surfaced in the 2018 CAT previous year paper. You need to possess high reading skills to imbibe the thought flow of the passages the CAT Exam throws at you!. If you feel you lack the necessary skills, check out Bharath's Reading List and read one article every day. For more such interesting RC questions try out 2IIM's CAT Question Bank.

---

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 18 : All of the following can be a possible feature of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, EXCEPT:

1. school funding and sanctions are tied to yearly improvement shown on tests.
2. standardised test scores can be critical in determining a student’s educational future.
3. the focus is more on test-taking skills than on higher order thinking and problem-solving.
4. assessment is dependent on the teacher's subjective evaluation of students' class participation.

---

---

Video Explanation

---

---

Explanatory Answer

Slightly tricky question. In paragraph 3, as an example to show how metric fixation leads to goal displacement –the focus on some measures at the expense of more important (but not measured) goals—the author cites the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and explains that ‘teaching to the test’ is a fallout of this. So, what cannot be a feature of the Act? Something important that is not quantifiable or measured—like the teacher’s subjective evaluation of a student’s class participation mentioned in option 4.

Options 1 and 2 tie test performance to high-stake rewards. Option 3 is about the focus on a less important goal at the expense of a more important one. These are problems associated with goal displacement, discussed in paragraph 3. They strengthen—not weaken—the author’s argument.

---

The question is "All of the following can be a possible feature of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, EXCEPT: "

Hence, the answer is assessment is dependent on the teacher's subjective evaluation of students' class participation.

Choice D is the correct answer.