Satirical ways to measure academics

Academia involves a lot of bean counting. Typical ways to measure professors include grant funding, published papers, impact factor, conference rankings, citations, i10-index, h-index, students graduated, course evaluations, invited talks, committees, and so forth.

I propose a few alternatives that might even be more useful:

Candy bar index

• Number of times students mention treats (e.g., candy or pizza) in course evaluations.
• It can either mean the instructor likes their students or it can mean they are bribing them.

Jurisprudential metric

• Average length of syllabi.
• A syllabus says a lot about the instructor. More than 15 pages and you are a lawyer attempting to write loophole-less contracts. The longest I've seen is 32 pages.

Good number

• Number of favorable recommendation letters written.
• Writing strong letters for students can take considerable effort and is often invisible to everyone else. Protect those with high good numbers!

Ramble rating

• Percentage of all words spoken at a faculty meeting.
• Consider muting anyone with a ramble rating of 10% or higher.

Dean factor

• Hours in meetings per week.
• If their dean factor is sustainably over 20, then they have become an administrator (or they have another job).

Innovation adoption score (IAS)

• Number of CSS rules on their website.
• Computer science faculty are notorious for their black-and-white, HTML-only websites. Given that CSS is only 20 years old, some professors are still adopting the new technology.

X differential

• Number of tweets during the semester minus number of tweets during breaks.
• Do they advocate for science only during workdays or year round? Be leery of anyone with a large X differential, whether it is a positive or negative score, or if it is zero.