Perverse Incentives

High-stakes testing culture—be it for school examinations, job interviews, or professional licensing—creates perverse incentives to "teach to the test," or worse, cheat. In the city of Atlanta in 2011, 178 educators were implicated in a widespread scandal involving correcting student answers on standardized tests, ultimately resulting in eleven convictions and sentences of up to twenty years on racketeering charges. Similarly, hospitals and colleges have been increasingly criticized for trying to achieve rankings at the expense of providing quality care and education, the very things the rankings are supposed to be measuring.