Evaluate on a Spider Plot

written by Eric J. Ma on 2015-06-27

Observation:

Humans like to measure things.
Humans also like to evaluate things.
Humans usually like to have only one metric for evaluations.

Example: Academic performance.

Performance is measured using grades: letter, or percentage.
Performance is evaluated on how good or bad the letter/percentage is.
All of that gets condensed to one number: GPA/Average.

It's easy to evaluate stuff on a single number. But it also creates some problems. Nuances are lost. Subspecialty strengths are not shown. Could we do better? I think so.

Proposal: Rather than evaluate stuff on a single line, I think we should start evaluating people on a multi-dimensional spider plot. Keep the metrics, but start evaluating people on more metrics than one.

Example: Job performance

Peer-reviewed perception of performance.
Company metrics attained.
Cross-departmental engagements.

Basically, measure more things that are valued than just the single thing that seemingly captures everything... but doesn't.

Thoughts?

Cite this blog post:

@article{
    ericmjl-2015-evaluate-on-a-spider-plot,
    author = {Eric J. Ma},
    title = {Evaluate on a Spider Plot},
    year = {2015},
    month = {06},
    day = {27},
    howpublished = {\url{https://ericmjl.github.io}},
    journal = {Eric J. Ma's Blog},
    url = {https://ericmjl.github.io/blog/2015/6/27/evaluate-on-a-spider-plot},
}

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