When I was in law school, UVa had an official policy of not disclosing class ranks. At the end of the first year, you knew you were in the top X% (I can't remember the number) if you graded onto law review. After graduation, you knew if you were in the top 10% if you were elected to Coif, but supposedly that was it. (The #1 graduate may have been recognized. I can't remember.) There was also an unofficial policy of quietly telling graduates competing for prestigious clerkships or teaching positions their class rank. So, as it happens, I know mine. (Rhymes with herd.)
Marc Hodak links to a study of the effects of ranking employees:
Prof. Barankay also offered workers either a job where they would be ranked or one where they wouldn’t be.
[T]he job without the feedback attracted more workers — 254, compared with 76 for the job with feedback.
“This was a surprising outcome, but it speaks to the paradigm of revealed preferences,” he notes. “Economists are usually very skeptical about what people say they will do. We focus on what people actually choose to do. Their choices convey information about what they care about. In this case, it seems that people would rather not know how they rank compared to others, even though when we surveyed these workers after the experiment, 74% said they wanted feedback about their rank.”
So, people generally don’t like to be ranked against their peers, even though they say they do, and rankings appear to encourage the high performers to slack off and the poor performers to give up. ...
This got me to thinking about ranking students. Maybe the policy of not disclosing class rankings, at least while the students are still in school, actually makes sense.
OTOH, what about the faculty? Our student evaluations are publicly available. Granted, we don't provide a ranking of faculty, but it's easy enough to figure out. Are we encouraging "the high performers to slack off and the poor performers to give up"? I don't think so, which makes me wonder whether there's a problem with the study or whether our incentive structure differs from most workplaces. My guess is the latter.
