Goodhart’s Law, the cobra bounty, and what happens when a measure becomes a target Somewhere in your house, possibly on your wrist right now, there may be a device counting your steps. Ten thousand a day is the number, and it is a perfectly reasonable stand-in for “move your body a bit more”. Right up…
A few years ago, Amazon quietly scrapped an AI tool it had built to sift job applications. The tool had been trained on ten years of the company’s own hiring decisions, the idea being that it would learn to recognise a good candidate the way Amazon’s best recruiters did. It learned something else. It taught…
Survivorship bias, the bombers that came home, and the data you never get to see “They don’t make them like they used to.” You have heard it, and you may even have said it, usually while admiring a solid old wooden dresser or a building that has stood for two hundred years. The craftsmanship was…
Guest post from Jim McCarten Recently I went to a retirement party for a former colleague, who’d put in over 37 years at our previous employer. This made me reflect on my own time, from joining, to leaving, the world of ‘IT’ as was and how this has altered so drastically in that time. It…
Most institutions already know where their data problems are. What they don’t always have is the time, the headspace, or an outside pair of eyes to do something about them. That’s the gap Sparkline Consulting works in. We work with universities, colleges and smaller providers across higher and further education on the practical end of…
Simpson’s paradox, the Berkeley admissions row, and how the overall number can tell the opposite story Let’s start with two colleagues. Priya and Tom both handle enquiries. The enquiries come in two kinds: easy ones, which mostly get resolved, and hard ones, which mostly don’t. On the easy ones, Tom has the better record: he…
Ask an admissions team whether they’re ready for AI and the conversation almost always turns to tools. Which platform, which features, which pilot, which vendor everyone else seems to be talking to. It’s a reasonable instinct. It’s also the wrong place to start. Readiness isn’t about the tool you bolt on. It’s about the conditions…
Averages, graduate salaries, and the number that nobody actually earns Imagine a bar with ten people in it. Nine of them are having a perfectly ordinary Tuesday – nurses, teachers, office workers, a couple of students. Between them they earn an average of around £30,000 a year. Then Bill Gates walks in. The average salary…
Genuinely. If you work in higher education, you’ll know that this time of year carries a particular kind of weight. The months of assessment, marking, moderation, and quality assurance that culminate in an exam board aren’t just administrative processes. They are the moment where years of student effort become an official outcome. Getting that right…
The Data Goddess has started a company. Today Sparkline Advisory officially launches – a consultancy for universities and colleges that want to manage their data well, meet their regulatory obligations without drama, and adopt AI with something other than panic or blind enthusiasm. If you have followed my work for a while, very little about…
