The project We Rate COVID Dashboards has been evaluating college and university attempts at transparency. Eight months into the pandemic, how are institutions doing?
Many things about this college semester have been new. For one, in most other years students would not regularly check a webpage to track the spread of disease on their campuses.
But while COVID-19 dashboards are now ubiquitous, they are not created equal.
That’s why Howard Forman and Cary Gross, both professors at Yale University College of Medicine, started We Rate COVID Dashboards, a project to evaluate and assess how well higher ed is communicating about spread on campus. The project, which is both a website and a Twitter account, assigns a letter grade to dashboards based on a rubric of nine criteria. Are the cases separated into students and staff? Is it updated every weekday?
“Around the summer I wanted to start tracking colleges because I knew they were opening and found enormous variation in college reporting,” said Forman. “Importantly my own university had a terrible dashboard when I first noticed it.” (Yale later improved and earned itself an A.)