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Comment by Smithalicious | Hacker News Reader

A moral of the story is that people will optimize for what's being measured, not what is intended. Machine learning does this even more so, with hilarious results.

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Yup. Another example of this is when I was in college and other students would go on ratemyprofessor or look up grade distributions for different professors and class options to pick the easiest ones. The thought of, you know, actually learning something even if it was hard wasn’t even a consideration - they just wanted the GPA.

This continues in the working world as well, unfortunately. Many employees will optimize behaviors and attention to what’s most likely to get them a bonus or promotion regardless of how damaging it is to other people, users, or the company long term.

The "choosing the easy professor path" always bothered me too; I always felt that it was stupid to go to college just to get the receipt, so I purposefully didn't do the ratemyprofessor thing, though now I almost wish I had, since I ended up on academic probation and eventually dropping out...though that might have less to do with my class selection and more to do with me spending most of my time playing Minecraft, upon reflection.

I think good companies (which are incredibly rare) will figure out how to make the behaviors that get people bonuses and/or promoted coincide with the ones that are good for the company long-term. Sadly, it doesn't seem to happen that way too frequently.

I would use rate my professor to make sure that I didn't end up with an over-the-top difficult general class that I didn't really care about but needed to fulfill a requirement (Art history, public speaking, etc). That way I could optimize my study time to focus on in-major classes.

It all depends on your goal of going to college. Do you have ad-hoc self-taught and real world experience doing your major? Then you may just want a paper to show your employer. No clue about anything in your field and want to learn? Then having intense classes should be your end goal. Everyone has different reasons for attending college, at the end of the day a lot of students forget that they're only there for themselves and no one outside of their classroom will care much about what they did in it.

Small anecdote: I always did worse in college with professors or courses that were looked at as “easy” because I was not motivated to put in effort. Courses that were looked at as hard or professors that were rated as tough tended to make me “respect the class” and subsequently do better and learn more.

That's not the only thing ratemyprofessor is useful for. Everyone has different learning styles. In college I did super well learning outside of class when needed, but being able to narrow down the professors to the ones I knew would be compatible with my in-class learning style was better than nothing.

You don't say... https://easy-a.net/

Maybe the professors who gave the best grades are the best teachers and that's why the students got better grades. If one teacher gave half of their students an A grade, and another one gave half of their students a failing grade, that doesn't sound like a problem with the students.

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