Quotes About Evaluation

Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.

If the desired system state is good education, measuring that goal by the amount

The only way to do this successfully is to have a well-thought-out set of standards drawn up for each type of work that you do, and in advance. If you wait till anyone item is finished you may find yourself reasoning after the fact, defending the fact-accomplished, and perhaps blinding yourself to real insufficiencies in it.

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two week's vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

When problems arise, a good question to ask yourself is "What am I hoping to get out of this situation?

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.

Thomas Paine had written, "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

Dear Mr. Gibbon. Sorry I was absent. Here is some salted food. Please grade it the way you would a jenti piece of beef jerky.

In the best classrooms, grades are only one of many types of feedback provided to students.

It's not that Twitter isn't successful, it just isn't successful enough to justify all the money investors have pumped into it.

we need to treat measurement as observations that quantitatively reduce uncertainty.

Once managers figure out what they mean and why it matters, the issue in question starts to look a lot more measurable.

Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all. —Gilb's Law

If we incorrectly think that measurement means meeting some nearly unachievable standard of certainty, then few things will be measurable even in the physical sciences.

measure what matters, make better decisions.

If you don't know what to measure, measure anyway. You'll learn what to measure.

I look at each episode in two ways - from a design standpoint and from an entertainment standpoint - this is TV, after all. We usually succeed on at least one of the levels.

We test students right after they read something mostly to ensure that they have in fact read it. From this, many have drawn the erroneous conclusion that the only good that can be extracted from their reading is that which can be displayed on or measured by a test. This is wildly inaccurate. Most of the good your reading and education has done for you is not something you can recall at all.

Our inability to identify rotten fruit on the branches means that we are especially unable to identify a problem at the root.

Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen of them, to give him an 87 percent. But we go far beyond this. A student writes an essay on a sunset, let us say, and the teacher writes 87 percent at the top of that paper. What he is saying, in effect, is that there is a mathematical metaphor operative here. The figure of 87 is to 100 what this submitted essay is . . . to what? What on earth is this supposed to mean?

If you have told twenty-eight people this week that "he missed his nap today" as an excuse for his disobedience, then perhaps you ought to re-evaluate. We all know there are times when this is not an excuse but a reasonable explanation. But if you find yourself resorting to excuses all the time, then you are just trying to get people to overlook your lack of wisdom and discipline.

I have often told people that they need to evaluate their lives by the video, and not by the snapshot. That is, they should not just look at one moment in time, but rather consider trajectories, tendencies, and narrative arc as well.

Only those who are in-charge are tackled and criticized by others so criticism is something desirable and should not be resented.