WORK
The COMPAS Case
Gentile and Krasniansky's 2020 Darden case study on Northpointe's criminal-justice risk algorithm — the canonical GVV exercise for AI ethics, asking not whether bias existed but what the engineer who saw it should have said.
The COMPAS case study, written by Mary Gentile and Adriana Krasniansky at the Darden School of Business in 2020, centers on Timothy Brennan, founder of Northpointe, and the AI risk-assessment tool his company built for American courts. Following ProPublica's 2016 investigation demonstrating that COMPAS produced higher false-positive rates for Black defendants than white ones, the case does not ask the ethical question the awareness framework would have posed: was the tool biased? That question had been answered. The case asks the performance question at the heart of Gentile's methodology: given that someone inside Northpointe saw the pattern before ProPublica did, what should that person have said, to whom, in what order, with what evidence, anticipating what objections? The case is a scripting exercise, not an analytical one, and it has become one of the most widely used teaching tools in AI ethics education.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The case's pedagogical power lies in its refusal