Comment by VanillaSwirl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VanillaSwirl | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion, but I think he's being overly dramatic.

"My Fall 2013 Math 1A students were tracked into the next course in the sequence, Math 1B, and it was found that their average grade in Math 1B was 0.17 grade points higher than that of those students who took Math 1A with another instructor."

0.17. Not even a whole point.

Student evaluations don't really count since those are highly subjective. Students tend to hastily mark whatever they want on them because they want to get the evaluations over with as soon as possible. If a professor is somewhat amicable and invests a moderate level of effort into his/her teaching, then it's not hard to score at least a 6 on average on these evaluations (as students would mark either 6 or 7 in such a case).

Anyway, his performance as a lecturer is irrelevant to his argument. There are three criteria that junior faculty are assessed against in order to become tenured at UC Berkeley (or, otherwise, dismissed): teaching quality, reputation and research. Funny how he left out the last bit. He hasn't published anything since 2013.

And the university is probably firing him to hire another professor at a cheaper salary in order to save money, contrary to his belief that the university is firing him because of disagreements with his teaching philosophy. Universities tend to do this to professors who don't have much research potential and don't teach specialized, upper division courses. The UC system is crippled financially, so departments are more inclined to carry out dismissals of non-tenured professors who don't publish much and who solely teach lower division courses. Non-tenured professors can be fired at will. That's just another day in the life of academia.

The part about the micro-managing harasser and treatment of women, staff and lecturers is definitely worrisome, though. But we need to be careful about believing in these implications absolutely because of Coward's state of mind at the moment. He has already blown the quality of his teaching out of proportion.

He isn't employed as a research professor. He's employed as a lecturer. Berkeley does have a lecturer position with security of employment (commonly called lecturer SOE or teaching professor). These positions are evaluated on teaching rather than research. I don't know how common it is in other departments, but I know the EECS department employs several teaching professors (which means many classes, especially 61A and 61B, are taught by professors whose primary job is teaching).

The math department here traditionally doesn't hire long-term lecturers, as mentioned in one of the email chains Coward attached.

That's a pretty poor reflection on the math department!

"Funny how he left out the last bit. He hasn't published anything since 2013."

The post suggests that he's "full-time lecturer". The grievance says that his job title is "Lecturer". Why would that require him to publish research?

I assume by grade point he means GPA (i.e. out of 4.0). So 0.17 is actually fairly significant.

If you read the whole article you'll see that he's actually lower paid. One of the reasons the department doesn't like him is that he demonstrates that it's possible to teach more students better (even if just slightly) at a lower salary, and that scares them because they're so focused on increasing their budget.

By my reading of the essay, he was hired as teaching faculty, so he is not being judged on his research or reputation within the research community.

It seems pretty clear that it is immensely difficult to score at least a 6 average on these evaluations. Based on the article, it sounds sufficiently difficult that almost no one else managed to score above a 6 in two decades.

Student evaluations are heavily influenced by perception of the professor's personality. Look on Ninja Courses and you'll see what I'm talking about. Coward has a cult of influence that makes him seem like a close friend to his students, and this no doubt skews his ratings and potentially distorts students' perception of the professor's performance as a teacher (rather than his personality).

There are professors whose teaching quality is actually proficient and sometimes excellent, but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc. Student evaluations are flawed in the same way intelligence tests are flawed; student evaluations favor professors who speak and communicate most closely to the popular consciousness of students at the time in the same way intelligence tests are biased against non-native test-takers (some questions posed on intelligence tests may use culturally native objects).

> There are professors whose teaching quality is actually proficient and sometimes excellent, but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc

And those teachers deserve to have lower student ratings, because the quality of the experience for the students is drastically lower even if they learn the material at relatively the same level of competence. I myself have social deficiencies, and I don't expect people to give me sympathy points if I ended up lecturing a large class.

I fail to see how anything you've written about Coward's "cult of personality" is bad at all.

>are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well

How can your teaching quality be proficient if you can't speak English well? Sure there are teachers who get unfair evaluations because they have a bit of an accent, but if you actually can't speak English well, how are you effectively teaching in English?

Though I think most of VanillaSwirls comments are generally confused, there are some biases that show up in this space. In particular, people rate the intelligibility/clarity of Caucasian speakers higher than that of East Asians even when the audio is the same.[0]

[0]: http://www.academia.edu/6126025/Expectations_on_Speech_Evalu...

Key quote from page 444: In a typical study in this paradigm, participants listened to 4 minutes of a tape-recorded lecture produced by a native speaker of standard American English. Some participants were lad[sic] to believe that they were listening to a North American NS[native speaker] instructor, whereas others were lead to believe that the instructor was an international NNS[non-native speaker].

[...]

[I]ndeed, listeners who were exposed to the Chinese/NNS guise perceived more of a foreign accent and scored lower on a recall test than those who were exposed to the Caucasian/NS guise even though the audiotape they heard was exactly identical (standard American English).

Yeah, that's definitely true. My brother is an applied linguistics grad student, so I've heard this before.

I've had instructors who had accents but could still speak English very well, and many people just dismissed them outright as unintelligible without even trying.

But I've also had instructors who just weren't fluent in English (mostly grad student instructors). When VanillaSwirls said they didn't speak English well, that's what I was thinking of.

>but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc. Student evaluations are flawed in the same way intelligence tests are flawed; student evaluations favor professors who speak and communicate most closely to the popular consciousness of students at the time in the same way intelligence tests are biased against non-native test-takers (some questions posed on intelligence tests may use culturally native objects).

Teaching is intrinsically tied to communication. Failure to communicate, failure to speak english well, is a failure in performing the art of teaching.

Who do you think the primary beneficiary of rating systems are, students or teachers?

Any benefit the teachers see from knowing their ratings is purely so that they can improve the experience for their students. If a professor can't speak english well or have social deficiencies preventing from communicating clearly, they aren't excellent teachers.

His salary is $67,886. Are you really going to hire somebody to do his job for less money than that?

In regards to your points about research, maybe the math department should consider establishing a "teaching professor" role like the EECS department has done. Most of the lower division introductory CS courses are taught by teaching professors like Paul Hilfinger, John Denero, Dan Garcia, and Josh Hug. Given that math is so important to a variety of majors on campus, why shouldn't we demand that large, lower division math courses be taught by people who are experts in teaching?

$67K is on the high end of the spectrum for a newly seasoned non-tenured faculty member. Anyway, teaching salaries are required to increase incrementally, so his original starting salary was most likely lower than that salary.

Most universities, particularly public ones, will engage in the practice of recycling lower-division teaching faculty every so often in order to avoid the wage jump from non-tenure status to tenure status.

Yeah, established teaching positions are a thing in other industrialized countries like Canada. The public higher-education system in the state of California has many flaws, and the absence of established teaching positions is one of them ... because the system is financially crippled.

And that's the point I'm trying to make here. Coward should not be mad at UC Berkeley's Math Department. He thinks the buck starts and stops with the Math Department. The department is the way it is because of the greater UC system's financial insolvency molded by factors out of the control of UC Berkeley's Math Department and UC Berkeley as a whole. The UC system sucks because of inappropriate state economic policies over the past decade or so that include egregious spending on unnecessary things.

The professors in the UC system are not paid well, but the administrators are all $100K+ with pensions

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