Value-Added Measures (VAM)

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Value-Added Measures (VAM)
Scott Mcleod, Dangerously Irrelevant, April 22, 2013
There's a whole industry based on evaluating teachers - and yet, it seems to me the statistics it relies upon would be dismissed outright if used to evaluate professional baseball players or other athletes. The current measures are quite coarse, like ranking a ballplayer based on wins and losses in the month of April. Nobody would rely on this, and because many variables relate to wins (including the strength of one's opponents, the contributions of teammates, health, and other intangibles) much more fine-grained measures are used. More...