Dartblog

At first glance President Kim’s ongoing campaign for evidence-based, data-driven decision making at the College is incomprehensible — at least to someone from the business world. I mean, how did Dartmouth’s administrators make decisions in the past? With a Ouija Board? Or Tarot Cards? It is sad to say, but yes, Virginia, large decisions involving millions of dollars were made at the College on no more than a feeling.

I’ll give you an example: a few years ago, Dartmouth once again renamed its freshman English program. What used to be English 5 and the Composition Center first became the Writing Program composed of Writing 5 and RWIT, and then finally the Institute for Writing & Rhetoric.

At a Dartmouth Club of the Upper Valley presentation about three years ago, the writing program’s director Professor Tom Cormen described the then-current incarnation of Dartmouth’s writing effort (forgive me if I forget exactly which one). From the audience, I asked the good professor just how well Dartmouth students write.

He did not have an answer. I prompted him and asked if problems with student writing lay with the bottom half of the class, or with all students, or the lowest 10%. Professor Cormen had said that he had just finished visiting all of the College’s undergraduate departments to get the faculty’s view on writing, and yet despite persistent questioning, he maintained that he had no real idea where students’ strengths and weaknesses lay.

I assumed that he was being coy, consistent with the Wright Administration’s position that all was perfect in the most perfect of Dartmouth worlds, so I went to see Professor Cormen in his office to ask him the question again. Accessible as always, he said that measuring students’ writing skills was quite difficult and that adminstrators were still working on developing adequate metrics. I think that they still are.

Not long after that, the Trustees made a decision to have all incoming freshmen take Writing 5 — at that time about one third of the class with the highest AP scores did not take the course (and still does not, due to the budget crisis). The rationale for this decision: well, I guess that the decision was made — without data — that students who scored highest on their AP English test were the ones in most need of supplementary writing help.

Make sense to you? Not to me. In the business world, we study a market, identify a need, design a solution, and implement it — and we carefully measure our efforts at each step. I hope that President Kim does the same in working to improve the College, and that he is able to persuade his entire Adminstration to adopt this clearly inhabitual way of working.

Addendum: As we have seen before, the College’s various alcohol policies seem to have had no discernible impact on student drinking, yet inside sources tell me that SEMP’s authors have never tried to measure the success (or utter lack thereof) of their various efforts.