Free Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

newsmagazine. They were almost likestudents again, angling for good grades from a taskmaster. In fact, they were trapped by a rigid model, a WMD.
    If the U.S. News list had turned into a moderate success, there would be no trouble. But instead it grew into a titan, quickly establishing itself as a national standard. It has been tying our education system into knots ever since, establishing a rigid to-do list for college administrators and students alike. The U.S. News college ranking has great scale, inflicts widespread damage, and generates an almost endless spiral of destructive feedback loops. While it’s not as opaque as many other models, it is still a bona fide WMD.
    Some administrators have gone to desperate lengths to drive up their rank.Baylor University paid the fee for admitted students to retake the SAT, hoping another try would boost their scores—and Baylor’s ranking. Elite small schools,including Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and California’s Claremont McKenna, sent false data to U.S. News , inflating the SAT scores of their incoming freshmen.And Iona College, in New York, acknowledged in 2011 that its employees had fudged numbers about nearly everything: test scores, acceptance and graduation rates, freshman retention, student-faculty ratio, and alumni giving. The lying paid off, at least for a while. U.S. News estimated that the false data had lifted Iona from fiftieth to thirtieth place among regional colleges in the Northeast.
    The great majority of college administrators looked for less egregious ways to improve their rankings. Instead of cheating, they worked hard to improve each of the metrics that went into their score. They could argue that this was the most efficient use of resources. After all, if they worked to satisfy the U.S. News algorithm, they’d raise more money, attract brighter students and professors, and keep rising on the list. Was there really any choice?
    Robert Morse, who has worked at the company since 1976 and heads up the college rankings, argued in interviews that the rankings pushed the colleges to set meaningful goals. If they could improve graduation rates or put students in smaller classes, that was a good thing. Education benefited from the focus. He admitted that the most relevant data—what the students had learned at each school—was inaccessible. But the U.S. News model, constructed from proxies, was the next best thing.
    However, when you create a model from proxies, it is far simpler for people to game it. This is because proxies are easier to manipulate than the complicated reality they represent. Here’s an example. Let’s say a website is looking to hire a social media maven. Many people apply for the job, and they send information about the various marketing campaigns they’ve run. But it takes way too much time to track down and evaluate all of their work. So the hiring manager settles on a proxy. She gives strong consideration to applicants with the most followers on Twitter. That’s a sign of social media engagement, isn’t it?
    Well, it’s a reasonable enough proxy. But what happens when word leaks out, as it surely will, that assembling a crowd on Twitter is key for getting a job at this company? Candidates soon do everything they can to ratchet up their Twitter numbers. Some pay $19.95 for a service that populates their feed with thousands of followers, most of them generated by robots. As people game the system, the proxy loses its effectiveness. Cheaters wind up as false positives.
    In the case of the U.S. News rankings, everyone from prospective students to alumni to human resources departments quickly accepted the score as a measurement of educational quality. So the colleges played along. They pushed to improve in each of the areas the rankings measured. Many, in fact, were most frustrated by the 25 percent of the ranking they had no control over—the reputational score, which came from the questionnaires filled out by college