C. Thi Nguyen

speaker

3,183 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 7 Jul

C. Thi Nguyen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Two Percent with Michael Easter · #25: Why Numbers, Scores, and Metrics Make Life Worse | Thi Nguyen · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

So one of the things that got me into this was in my first job, I was the learning outcomes liaison.

And what learning outcomes are are quantified measures of how you have –

successfully taught your students, but importantly, they're used for institutional transparency.

So what this means is like the Utah State Legislature doesn't know which departments are full of BS or not, and everyone's worried that philosophy is full of BS.

And so they want some kind of outcome that they can check on.

So if I say like, look, I'm gonna teach my students to be more reflective and more thoughtful, and they're like, and I'm like, I succeeded.

And they're like, how, prove that to us.

it's hard for me to do so because that requires an exercise of judgment.

So what learning outcomes tend to focus on is the kind of things that we can assess mechanically.

So they tend to focus, these days, they focus on graduation rate, graduation speed, student evaluation scores, salary after graduation.

But I just want, let me point this out.

I think this is a great case.

So if I have a student who's in my class

And they were dead set on a career in like some kind of business, optimize for money, destroy the world, do whatever.

And I teach them a bunch of material that shakes them up and makes them realize, oh, my God, relentlessly optimizing for money destroys the environment and also screws over other people.

And they also start to realize they've been unhappy all the time and they want to do something else.

So they take an extra year to figure out what they actually want to do.

And they look for an ethical job.

I have failed by learning outcomes.

Yeah.

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