One Idea

Last year I wrote a post on how Oxford selects undergraduate students for computer science. Oxford undergraduate admissions are politically charged: the British public suspects that Oxbridge is biased towards privileged applicants. This post is unpolitical though. I'm advocating a better way of solving a typical problem in academia: you have many candidates (think: papers, grant proposals, or Oxford applicants) and few assessors (think: members of program committees, assessment panels, or admission tutors), and the goal of the assessors is to select the best candidates. Since there are many candidates, each assessor can assess only some candidates. From a candidate's point of view: a paper may get 3 reviews, a grant proposal perhaps 5, and a shortlisted Oxford applicant may get 3 interviews. Each such review comes with a score that reflects the assessor's estimate of the candidate's quality. The problem is that different assessors will score the same candidate differ