Sharad Goel

Instructors at 2- and 4-year colleges! Give your students free access to a virtual tutor optimized for learning by taking part in our study on using AI to improve education. Instructors receive a $1,000 honorarium. Sign up by Dec. 16! pingpong.hks.harvard.edu/eduaccess

Making my Bluesky debut with a few long-overdue paper announcements, beginning with my recent working paper on social sycophancy in LLMs. arxiv.org/abs/2609.26579 (with Johann Gaebler, @mlamparth.bsky.social, @juliaminson.bsky.social, and @5harad.com)

🚨Come work with us! 🚨 We're hiring a postdoc for Stanford's AI for Public Benefit Lab (ai4pb.stanford.edu), in partnership with @stanfordhai.bsky.social Open to PhDs from psych, poli sci, sociology, CS, econ, HCI, data science, etc. Please share! Position: postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/...

Hiring alert! We have 3 exciting roles open in lab leadership & software engineering. Apply today: 1. Associate Director of Research: careers.harvard.edu/job/associat... 2. Software Engineer: careers.harvard.edu/job/software... 3. Senior Software Engineer: careers.harvard.edu/job/senior-s...

📣 Job alert! 📣 Harvard Kennedy School is seeking to hire a senior faculty member who is using technology to address public problems. Please apply by Sep. 15, and help us spread the word! academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/16670

In a large field experiment with real students, o3-mini (very obsolete) in an agentic loop made very good exam questions: "we found that this approach achieves psychometric properties on par with those of questions appearing on high-stakes standardized tests." arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08314

Standardized test scores improve predictions of academic performance but matter relatively less for admissions decisions, since few applicants are near the decision threshold, from Johann D. Gaebler, Calvin Isley, Christopher Avery, and Sharad Goel www.nber.org/papers/w35407

📢 Instructors at 2- and 4-year colleges! Give students free access to a virtual tutor optimized for teaching and learning by joining our study—now continuing into Spring 2026. Eligible instructors receive a $1,000 honorarium. Sign up by 12/17 for priority review: pingpong.hks.harvard.edu/eduaccess

📣 Job alert! 📣 Harvard Kennedy School is running 2 open-rank faculty searches in technology & public policy. One position is specifically for scholars using data science to address public problems. Please help us spread the word! academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15561

We’re hiring multiple full-time software engineers at @comppolicylab.bsky.social! Our team builds and deploys technology to tackle pressing public problems, in education, the delivery of government benefits, and beyond. Please help us spread the word! careers.harvard.edu/job/software...

Instructors at 2- and 4-year colleges! Give your students free access to a virtual tutor optimized for learning by taking part in our study on using AI to improve education. Instructors receive a $1,000 honorarium. Apps received by 8/8 receive priority: pingpong.hks.harvard.edu/eduaccess

(1/2) Our own Johann Gaebler and @5harad.com, w/coauthors @seanjwestwood.bsky.social & Shanto Iyengar, analyzed 50+ years of US TV news using a novel LLM-based classification system. They find a steep decline in in-depth political coverage & substantive reporting, while soft news & commercials rise.

NEW in Management Science! My coauthors and I came up with a new consequentialist approach to designing equitable algorithms. Instead of imposing fairness criteria on an algorithm (like equal false negative rates), we aim for good outcomes. More in the 🧵 below! (1/)

🚨 Excited to share our new article in @annualreviews.bsky.social. Working with Kristin Linn, @5harad.com, Amol Navathe, and Ravi Parikh, we examine the fairness debates of seven prominent and controversial healthcare algorithms.🧵 madisoncoots.com/files/racial...

Calling instructors at 2- and 4-year colleges! Give your students free access to a virtual tutor optimized for learning by taking part in our study on using AI to improve education. Learn more and sign up by Dec. 16: zurl.co/WitA

Naviance is widely used by high school students to help them decide where to apply to college. In our new PNAS paper, Sabina Tomkins, Josh Grossman, Lindsay Page and I show it can inadvertently dissuade qualified students from applying to selective schools. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our paper "The Measure and Mismeasure of Fairness" — long in draft form — is now out in JMLR! We show that common error rate measures are often misleading indicators of algorithmic bias, and argue it's better to evaluate algorithms by looking at their effects. 5harad.com/papers/fair-...

Call for papers! Behavioral Science & Policy is running a special issue on behavioral insights for AI policy. Great opportunity to reach policymakers. Initial submissions just require a 500-word abstract by Dec. 1. Please help us get the word out! behavioralpolicy.org/wp-content/u...

In a new randomized experiment at the Santa Clara County Public Defender Office, my colleagues and I found that text message reminders reduce *incarceration* for missed court dates by over 20%! More in the 🧵 below. alexchohlaswood.com/assets/paper... 1/11

We find that Asian American applicants — especially South Asians — are much less likely to be admitted to selective colleges than white students with similar test scores, GPAs, and extracurricular activities. Much of the gap is due to geography and preferential treatment of legacy applicants.

New faculty position at the intersection of politics and computing at MIT https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/25219