Los cuatro jinetes de la evaluación: productivismo, reduccionismo, cuantofrenia y simulación

Abstract

This article describes and analyzes four adverse effects produced by the policies and institutions designed to evaluate faculty members in Mexican universities. These effects are Productivism and conspiracy against quality; professor are evaluated very frequently and the institutional evaluating rubrics for ranking faculty give more weight to the quantity of the products evaluated than to their quality, this combined situation discourages the pursuit of large scale projects. Reductionism and evaluators fatigue; the massive amount of work needed to evaluate all the required files pushes evaluators to simply reward those who can deliver large numbers of completed products. Quantophrenia and numerology; evaluation through quantitative indicators and obsessive reliance on measurement. Crony academia and the simulation of evaluation; persistence of opaque and biased evaluations, in which formalities are met but evaluators benefit mostly the members of their own cliques.