Faculty Merit Act Is Meritless (opinion)

"NAS's proposed Faculty Merit Act would require public universities to publish every higher ed standardized test score-SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT and more-of every faculty member and every applicant for that faculty member's position across different stages of a faculty search. The goal, they claim, is to expose discrimination and restore meritocracy. Letter to the editor The proposal's logic is explicit: If standardized test scores are a reasonable proxy for faculty merit, then a fair search should select someone with a very high score."

"But the Faculty Merit Act rests on a serious misunderstanding of how measurement and selection actually work. Even if one accepts Randall's premise that a standardized test score "isn't a bad proxy for faculty merit," the conclusions he draws simply do not follow. The supposed red flags the proposed act promises to reveal are not evidence of corruption. They are the expected mathematical consequences of using an imperfect measure in a large applicant pool."

NAS's proposed Faculty Merit Act would require public universities to publish every higher ed standardized test score—SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT and more—for every faculty member and every applicant across stages of a faculty search. The proposal assumes standardized-test scores reasonably proxy faculty merit and that hires with lower scores than rejected applicants indicate corruption. Statistical reasoning shows declines in average scores across rounds or hires scoring below many applicants can result from measurement error, selection dynamics, and large applicant pools. Mandatory disclosure would risk mislabeling expected statistical patterns as evidence of discrimination and create misleading transparency.

Read at Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs