If you're exhausted by the college admission process, you're not alone. So are the admissions officers

[1NJParent]

@ucbalumnus

Basically that is the problem where an attempt to measure or proxy something desirable incentivizes participants to optimize the proxy measure rather than the actual desired characteristic. There often is still some correlation between the proxy measure and the actual desired characteristic, but it is confounded by “teaching to the test” or “test preparation” that may result in higher proxy measures than the actual desired characteristic for some, and lower proxy measures for those who did not do such activity.

Quality of students varies a great deal from school to school, from district to district. Why do we use students’ performance on a test as a proxy to measure teachers’ performance? Some teachers are clearly unqualified or underqualified. Why not test the teachers directly? “Teaching to the test” wouldn’t be a problem if that were the case.