What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?
npr.org
npr.org
The better the professors were, as measured by their
students' grades in later classes, the lower their
ratings from students.
"If you make your students do well in their academic
career, you get worse evaluations from your students,"
Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don't enjoy
learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some
good.Evaluations are at the end of the course and you will know if you have learned a lot.
The problem is profs just reading the textbook or parts of the textbook in a powerpoint, without challenging students.
Profs that consistently get poor reviews are getting them for a reason.
And now students are much worse, they're expecting a "value for money", they want to be entertained. They do not like being pushed hard. Just look at all those disgusting stories:
http://sheffield.tab.co.uk/2015/01/29/devastated-economists-... (what kind of cretins can find such an exam "too complicated"?)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-31814659 (another bunch of morons enjoying a right to have their say)
This crap must be stopped. Once and for all.
There is absolutely no context in that article, and it shows a single question from the exam, yet you deduce that everyone that wrote and complained about it is a moron?
This is a two-way street: I've seen ridiculous student complaints, but I've also had terrible instructors. There are "cretins" on both sides of the table.
But HN is regularly bombarded with articles about colleges and universities being an over-valued investment.
But how can you chain that in the same sentence to a right to be entertained ?
You sound like Socrates (or better yet: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children...)
Would you go to a doctor who skipped a college? Do you want to drive over a bridge designed by a bunch of hipster dropouts? If not, then the higher education is still relevant, and all the hipsters must just shut up.
> But how can you chain that in the same sentence to a right to be entertained ?
I'm quoting one of the student complaints - that a lecturer is not "entertaining enough", and this is not "what they paid their money for".
EDIT: and yes, it's not the students who changed recently, it's the creeping commercialisation of the education system in general. Students are "consumers" now, and this is a new thing indeed. They should not be blamed for such an attitude, of course.
Simple question. Really convoluted answer. But the end payers are the students. And they want their money's worth.
Of course, the worth is derived from their uneducated selves, and "higher educated" peoples know what's best for them.
A percent of income for X years seems much fairer way of paying for education. But even that has its flaws. We have yet to see the full blowback from our current way of financing higher ed. My estimate is 20 years. And 2008 will be a walk in the park.
Instead, I imagine something different for a school. If someone fails a course, one has to retake it. This is silly if one is trying to learn. Instead, the answer is to stick with the area of problem until it is understood. But, because profit motives take hold, it is simply easier to fail someone.
The better answer for teaching is less material per class, shorter classes (vs 18 weeks), and quick to fail. And aside that should be no punishment to fail. In essence, aside laziness, it is both the teacher and the student who fail when a concept is not learned, but the onus lies purely on the student in our system.
I also believe that payment should be hinged upon future earnings, and not a ballooned sum payable in the hopes of a job. A percentage would be fair for X years... Of course I acknowledge that this could cause the liberal arts to falter. Marx and Engels divined this long ago with their analysis of capitalism and supremacy of what we call STEM degrees.
Education is selective and there is nothing wrong with it. Self-education is a very important part of it, and the only thing teacher really must consistently do is to help the students to identify their flaws as quickly as possible so they can go and address them.
But, yes, everyone must be able to retake any course any number of times, until either passed or pissed off.
I think it would be interesting to know if professors who push and challenge within a non-dgree open online course would face the similar wrath? I'd bet not.
Um, have you been to a university? ;-)
When you think about it, the professors aren't (necessarily) there to teach either. They are there primarily for the opportunity to do research though that may be changing as many professors are part time minimum wage contractors.
Students, and probably just people in general, are really bad at knowing what they have learned.
> Controlled, randomized experiments find that
> SET ratings are negatively associated with
> direct measures of effectiveness. SET seem
> to be influenced by the gender, ethnicity,
> and attractiveness of the instructor.
> We find that teacher quality matters substantially
> and that our measure of effectiveness is negatively
> correlated with the students’ evaluations of professors.
========
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9445924
[1] http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/evaluations14....
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775714...
It definitely applies. One of the best profs in my department often got poor evaluations in some of the first year courses she taught (which were required for everyone). But, she consistently gets excellent ratings for her 3rd year, 4th year, and grad courses (which were targeted for her specialty). She's known for being tough, but students can learn a lot in her courses and they actually do well. First years seem to think that they can get away with more because she's a short woman. She's had students try and suggest how to change her exams after midterms because they've taught swimming lessons. She once had a comment on RateMyProfessor.ca, "I'd say she worships Satan, but I think Satan worships her." It was eventually dropped after several years, but she wrote it in calligraphy and put it up in her office. We all thought that was very funny.
<3
edit: Added clarification.
It's like sandpaper on my brain, but that's how linguistics works. The more you study language, the more you realize it can't possibly work.
As in:
"I couldn't care less about this test." (literal)
"I could care less about this test." (sarcastic)
Yes, the actual expression is "couldn't care less" but I can easily see how people think it is "could care less" (in a sarcastic tone).
Same as "by the waist side" instead of "by the wayside." The term "wayside" is so rarely used now that people mishear it and rationalise the alternative definition that does make sense.
There are other examples too (correct on the right):
- Nip it in the butt vs. Nip it in the bud
- One in the same vs. One and the same
- You’ve got another thing coming vs. You’ve got another think coming
- Each one worse than the next vs. Each one worse than the last
- On accident vs. By accident
- For all intensive purposes vs. For all intents and purposes
- Extract revenge vs. Exact revenge
- etc
I understand the implicit preface that is something like "If you want to communicate frictionlessly …", but I think that one actually doesn't have to do this. The arguments for accepting variants of spelling do not, I think, automatically apply to accepting (illogical) variants of phrases; while there is no intrinsically 'right' spelling of a word, there is a sense (given what the constituent words mean) in which "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" are objectively different, and the latter captures what is probably meant.
I mean to say that it is perfectly possible to insist on, and to try to enforce, a logical approach to the use of language. (Without this impulse, for example, we wouldn't have Lojban (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban)—which, OK, may not be a very practical loss, but I think we can agree would be an intellectual loss.) Granted this will not optimise for communication, or pleasant social interaction, but we all have the right to choose the fitness metric that we want to use!
One of the worst lecturers I had at university (thought the course he was teaching was way beneath him and basically didn't give a fuck) also gave such extremely easy tests that basically everybody passed almost despite themselves.
Like one guy I didn't learn a thing from, because he constantly mumbled and wrote in really tiny print on the whiteboard... yet the class before each test, he'd discuss every single test question in detail and tell us the answers.
A friend of mine had him for something else, and at one point after delivering a graded test, he said "if you didn't like your grade, give your test back to me and I'll give you more points". My friend, who got a 95, decided to give it back out of sheer curiosity and got back a 98.
Edit: Hey, I have another story about this dude: another friend of mine had him for a class. This friend is legally blind, so he once asked for more time to take the test since it takes him longer to read everything. A perfectly reasonable request: it's even listed on the form of accomodations offered by the university's Disability Services. Well, when the professor filled out the form, he granted my friend literally every single disability accomodation the university offered. He ended up with dozens of accomodations he didn't even ask for
The right way to do it is "if you don't agree with your grade, give me your paper and I will look at it more carefully. Of course I'm not just going to look at the question you're contending, but all of them. Your grade may go up, but it also may go down. Do you wish to wager?"
A very good high school math teacher of mine did this.
I think he did not get very many takers; the students were never confident that they would not lose more undeserved marks in the other question to more than offset any gain.
This moves regrade requests more toward "No, I checked over my exam again and I'm sure this is a mistake..." rather than "Maybe I'll pick up another point or two..."
WTF does that even mean?
Look, I'm a student. I'm supposed to make mistakes. It's natural for me to be wrong. I should be wrong many times now so that I can learn and not make those mistakes in the future.
But you're a teacher. You are supposed to correct mistakes. You are supposed not to make mistakes, or at the very least to be honest about those mistakes. You're not supposed to try to intimidate me so that I stop questioning you; you're supposed to encourage critical thinking and healthy scepticism.
In short: if a teacher hears that he made a mistake when grading it's his duty to check it again, carefully; and if it happens to be true he should be honest about it and admit it instead of threatening that he'll lower the grade even further. What your teacher said could be read as: "Ok, so I may have fucked up, but that doesn't matter, because I'm so much smarter than you and I can fuck you up in any way I'd like; do you want me to show you?" Your teacher probably didn't mean it that way, but I met a fair share of teachers who did; it would be best to stay away from such ambiguous phrasings altogether.
When I was teaching my policy was to reconsider anything a student felt was a mistake in grading, as long as it was accompanied by a written memo explaining precisely what the mistake was. I found this to be a good way to ensure I was getting legitimate regrade requests, since students would only put in the effort to write the memo if they really felt something was wrong.
That the teacher has made one mistake implies the teacher may have made more than one mistake, and there's some probability that those errors are in your favor. And if its really correctness you're worried about, rather than just going for a better grade, then you should be okay with a full on review. But you should be confident that there are errors, rather than just winging it for the occasional payoff.
As just one example: She'd do this thing after every exam where she would call off each name one at a time, have them walk to the front of the class to get back their graded test, where she would then berate them for anything they got wrong on the exam. It didn't matter if you got a A, if there was single thing wrong on the exam she would berate you over it. Really vicious personal attacks. It was so extreme that for a class of 20-30 students, it took the full hour to hand back tests. Averaging 2-3 minutes per student, yelling at them in front of the entire class.
Needless to say she always got awful reviews from her students, but if that effected her career, it was not apparent.
I think this type of evaluation has a role to play in order to improve teaching, but shouldn't be given too much importance for evaluating professors.
The biggest factor in my own case is that in retrospect I have more respect for the difficult courses, and less respect for the easy courses, then I did at the time they actually took place. I think this is mostly because at the time I judged courses by whether they felt fair/unfair, and the easiest way for a professor to avoid students feeling they were judged unfairly is to just judge everyone in a broadly positive way. If you give some people Cs, inevitably some of them will feel they deserved higher (and sometimes they will even be right, since there is an error rate). While if you give everyone an A/B there's less cause for complaint, because many fewer students perceive getting a grade higher than they deserve as unfair.
A secondary factor is that when judging in retrospect I put a little less weight on personality and style than I did at the time. Professors with a "entertaining/engaging" style generally seemed good to me at the time, but in retrospect some of them were a bit shallow in the actual material (some were good, though). As an adult occasionally looking for online lectures, I now tend to specifically avoid the more "TED-style" lecturers, even though they are initially appealing, and find I get more out of a more straightforward, sober style.
Some of the really easy and "fun" courses in particular feel like a missed opportunity to me: we had a good time every week in class, I got an A, and I rated the course positively, but I've had to go back and self-study from a book because I had not actually learned much the first time around. If you asked me for the rating 5 years later, I would've revised it downwards!
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf
"... our results show that student evaluations reward professors who increase achievement in the contemporaneous course being taught, not those who increase deep learning."
Just imagine if universities decided to no longer offer degrees and only offered the opportunity for deep understanding and learning. Get rid of grades too, just offer P/F for readiness for the next level of teaching. Do you think student evaluations would still have this bias?
I guess we can rank teachers in three tiers:
(1) The lowest tier, consisting of teachers both loved and despised who either way fail to prepare students for future classes.
(2) Abhorred teachers who do succeed in preparing students for future coursework.
(3) The highest tier, consisting of beloved teachers who do succeed in preparing students for future coursework.
It's very hard to get into the third tier, because it requires remarkable finesse to make students feel good about having to work extremely hard and possibly still not getting a good grade.
Out of curiosity, what class traditionally 'belonged' to that teacher?
Freshman classes for non-majors (think pre-algebra for art majors) taught in a harsh-but-fair manner is going to score differently than an upper-class or graduate level on manifolds.
One was an english professor who had control over the courses about science fiction and fantasy, and often taught a Tolkien course. No real mystery why he was so popular (although he was also a really great personable guy).
The other was a math professor that taught the standard assortment of undergrad math classes. I had him for Calc I, Calc III, and Discrete. Most of the math professors in my university that were teaching those classes (particularly the calculus classes) were either hated or unknown. However he had a reputation for being a truly gifted lecturer, and for having incredibly accommodating office hours. His reputation was well earned and deserved.
Michigan? Rabkin?
I never actually took any of those classes from him (very difficult classes to get into), but I did have a creative writing class with him freshmen year. He gave me a lot of really good feedback that made it clear that he had carefully read what I wrote. A very good professor in his own right, but teaching those very popular classes could only help.
His classes were notoriously hard, but he was so well-liked for four reasons:
(1) he was a gifted lecturer who put an immense amount of effort into finding clear explanations of every single concept -- nothing was spared from his relentless pursuit for clarity; he was also genuinely excited about the subject and was able to pass that excitement off to students.
I think students appreciated that, instead of putting his effort into creating some complicated class structure and a huge syllabus and fancy slides, he instead invested himself in finding the best possible explanations. There was definitely a sense that attending his lecture was a lot more valuable than reading the book, though that was always recommended too.
(2) he was very generous with his time and would always accommodate questions or requests for help.
(3) he took a keen interest in each and every student and kept up-to-date on everyone's individual progress; he never wanted anyone to accidentally get left behind. That doesn't mean that he'd give you a good grade out of sympathy, but it would be clear by the end of the class that you wouldn't have anyone to blame but yourself if you didn't do well. Even for the most jaded student, it's hard to be mad at the professor when it's made exceedingly clear that it's your own fault for not doing well.
(4) he was absolutely and utterly not pretentious in any way, and he was, in general, extremely kind; he had a way of making anyone feel welcome, even excited, to be in his classes, even if you weren't a math major or weren't very interested in math.
I wonder if the the same relationship is true in fields where there is a licensing exam at the end of your degree (like engineering). Or maybe something like a high-school AP class, where the final exam isn't written by the person teaching. In that case, the teacher would be more obviously on "the same side" as the student.
I did not have a single situation where I did not know the difficulty of a course going in. While professors may not adequately let you know, any one of your friends or a number of websites make this information easy to obtain.
I feel like I might be alone in this, but I feel like if anything, a professor should warn you if they know that they do not challenge and push. You're in a university course -- it should be challenging. Courses should not be designed for an average student to excel.
I'm still at a loss for understanding why physics is required for the MCAT.
Well, that's your problem. There's a ton of physics that premeds should learn, but gravity is not one of them. Calculating electric potentials, forces etc. as applied to biological membranes would be infinitely better. Teach them the doppler effect, so they'll understand that ultrasound flow meter from the get go. Don't even get me started on NMR, PET, proton radiation therapy, ...
There is so much physics involved in medicine, that it's bizarre to hear that premeds are taught about spaceships. Perhaps it's due to this strange perception some people have that physics is only about subatomics and astronomy.
If you want to see someone who does an exceptionally good job teaching physics to the non-hard sciences, Brian Jones at Colorado State is kind of renowned in physics education circles as being one of the most effective in being able to convey lots of good meaningful entry level physics to soft sciences and pre-med.
I remember constructing one numerical assignment for intro phys. for mech. eng. that was supposed to teach numerical integration of ODEs, so I had them set up Newton's second law for a soccer penalty kick, working their way up to including realistic air resistance plus Magnus effect. Boy, they were excited to be able to curve that ball past the keeper into the upper corner of the goal (this was Matlab and I gave them code to draw the path in 3D on a soccer field).
So it is the most natural way to learn about scientific methodology in general. The other sciences are still largely in a phenomenology stages, while physics features multiple nice, small, tidy, very well-developed theories, and it is pretty much unique in this sense.
Medical students will find it much easier to comprehend the reason behind the double-blind method after comprehending the classic, simple Popperian methodology on the obvious physics examples.
It seems illogical to expect students to make an acts focused on selfless learning right at the point that you are making the teacher's position tenuous and thus forcing said teacher to be thinking about immediate self-interest.
Nothing provokes a low rating like failing.
Direct quote from a student eval [1] of the hardest professor I've ever had. There are more like it. The professor blew it up and posted it on his bulletin board. It would irreparably damage higher learning to put the livelihood of teachers like this in the hands of kids who can't even legally drink yet.
And -- in keeping with the premise of the article -- I went on to spend the next two years on the Dean's List, in no small part because I had learned so much in Locascio's classes.
I find myself gaining the most from courses where the professor destroys me. I spend all semester struggling with certain concepts and then at some point towards the end, once I've been exposed to the bigger picture, everything falls together and all the previous material I didn't understand now makes sense. The problem is that I've already been evaluated for the material. If I get a D in a course and retake it and get an A should I still have that D on that record, even though I arguably know the material better than someone who got a B on their first go?
While failure is probably the best way to learn, society conditions people to avoid failure like the plague.
But there are poor professors who are evaluated poorly by students yet teach year after year with no improvement. So the problem is that the evaluations are not being used properly -- by professors and administrators -- to make the necessary adjustments. Shouldn't we be firing the administrators?
A professor has to be able to force a student to do something they don't want to. "You don't understand this." "You're not doing this right." "You're not working hard enough to learn what you need to learn in the limited amount of time we have, here." Etc. A student might find this unpleasant, embarrassing, or whatever. But that doesn't mean the professor is wrong. Or bad at their job.
Student evaluations are valuable, of course, but the idea of using them alone to decide a professor's fate seems incredibly unfair.
Sounds like a student's life. Cry me a river, professor.
The student-teacher relationship is a collaboration.
Also, please don't go through life thinking that every single person you might give money to for something is your "servant." Not even the person on the other side of the McDonald's counter.
They don't.
Instead, the student is bound to pay every last cent of the education. Nowhere, other than court punishments and child support are debts protected against bankruptcy.
So yes, if I pay for it, I own it or I control it.
Edit: You misunderstand. I said servant, and I mean servant; not slave. Webster: "a person who is hired to do household or personal duties such as cleaning and cooking". Even the McDonalds cashier is that, when taking my order.
I work in a staff role at an university. I see things from the students and the faculty role. I see many students who skate by, doing little and collecting the degree. I also see professors who I'm surprised still figure out how to breathe.
I also see that the university props up a great deal of failing architectures (both buildings and power structures) that would fail readily except for the 'wonderfulness' of student loans. What money they bring in now will be paid in 10 fold twenty or so years from now.
I also know that my own job is artificially propped up because of students' debt. I also reduce cost for the university, knowing that the huge monument or statue or building was funded, because the uni has easy money.
My parents also told me of a time when one could work a summer job and pay for the rest of school year. Long are those times gone.
Professors are not your employees, and the notion that you should get your class "the way you want" - especially considering a likely double digit number of students all wanting it their way - is absurd.
The professor should clearly give me them.
Well, bring them to me. I can't be bothered actually going to class.
The great majority of the students doesn't know how the sausage is made and should well keep out of personnel decisions. They don't even know what the sausage is!
I am not in academia, but in retrospective some of my greatest professors where very hard to deal teachers with huge fail rates. Most students hated them.
I had a Calculus prof who was worthless. She would literally read from the book and copy it verbatim on the blackboard. No questions. If you had a question you had to write it down on a piece of paper and leave it on her desk. If she could get around to it the question might be answered in a day or two. Students had no way to fire this prof or get her reviewed and replaced. We had to endure the torture and learn on our on.
If you make this sort of contact, though, I'd recommend against saying anything like "[you] should be embarrassed and ashamed to have such a professor." Stick to facts.
Also, note that even very accomplished and intelligent people can make mistakes when they speak. I don't know what "obviously incorrect" facts you professor is stating, but I've had good professors bumble words and even ideas. And I know (as a former student) that students love discovering and pointing out those errors. Even if they have no real bearing on the quality of education being delivered.
But I'd start with laying out concrete things, rather than "embarrassed and ashamed".
What if students could run the university?
When a professor is rated low, at least some of that rating has to do with the professor having a high standard in the awarding of grades and passing of students.
If students get good grades then no matter how much the lectures suck, or how unavailable that professor is for help and so on, large numbers of those students will not rate that professor low. Poor grades are the exacerbating factor in a revolt against a professor.
If you're a C student, the moment you see a B+ next to your student ID on the course results table, all memories of the prof either vaporize or become rose-colored.
Also, one reason some jobs prefer applicants with degrees is because university completion shows that you have some ambition and willingness to work hard toward a goal that is several years away, in the face of deadlines and stress, and possibly financial risk also. They know you've pulled a few all-nighters to get through.
In other words, you're gone through a pretty tough four year (or more) project: to produce a degreed version of yourself.
That degree shows that you can work, even if you don't have employment experience.
Yeah you are probably right about ambition as a general filter too. But the point remains that universities take advantage of this. They know full-well that plenty of students are there to get a job and they can and do milk this.
Issuing degrees is not part of Universities being "about education". Degrees are an arbitrary milestone, that can be received after completing a nearly arbitrary set of classes, that in-turn have taught an arbitrary set of lessons. The fact that Universities have coalesced around issuing degrees of the same type without ensuring their curriculums match further makes the degrees aribitrary.
Another huge factor in course evaluations is the economic environment and prospects for upcoming graduates. Tight labor markets seem to correlate with higher course evaluations as students value subjects that will hopefully make them more marketable. Conversely, a lot of courses get hammered when the job market is good because students start getting a "just give me the piece of paper so I can get out there" feeling.
When you take a hard course it consumes a disproportionate amount of attention. Even if the teacher is bad at his/her job a harsh grading scheme will drive you to spend hours in the library. You will learn a lot because you are burning valuable attention; attention other classes can not have. So such a class necessarily good? Of course not. Not if the learning benefit is outweighed by learning opportunity cost.
So regarding the finding of the study
The better the professors were, as measured by their
students' grades in later classes, the lower their
ratings from students.
My tax dollars should be mostly supporting their research. Teaching should be a collateral duty. It is not a valuable use of time for good researchers. If we need superb instructors to teach basic material to undergrads, let them be called something else.
Is there really a single person on this forum who didn't do the bulk of their real learning outside the classroom, anyway?
The faculty that I am on is one of the lowest scoring areas of the university according to the National Student Survey. I assume this is due to the lecturers not having the knowledge or experience when compared to the students who are passionate about their field which they are currently studying for a degree in. Most have managed to get the job with little industry experience to share with students and don't have experience with a modern workflow such as using Linux, git, etc.
Personally, I would be much more happier if the lecturers have a basic salary but then allow students to give more of a percentage of their tuition fees to the departments that keep up to date with their field.
Frankly, I'm not surprised. Back when I was TAing and tutoring, it was pretty clear to me that a great many students just wanted the high mark, and were much less concerned with how they got it. And I've had way too many conversations with people complaining about a doctor refusing to prescribe antibiotics for a viral infection.
--Alvin Kernan, In Plato's Cave
I don't recall there being student evaluations of teachers in my undergraduate days (which were not spent at Yale or anything like it). When I went back to school part time in my 30s, I wrote bad things about only a couple of instructors, both for showing up unprepared (and occasionally not showing up at all).
It's only now that I genuinely appreciate everything they taught me that I feel honestly worthy of sitting in their classroom again to learn what is they're willing to impart.
So I say thanks to those teachers that pushed me, those that held me accountable, those that I disliked during school. It was you that would likely have been fired by these performance evaluations that gave me the most. I just never would have had the foresight to give you the grade you deserved.
For whatever its worth the professor that was teaching the class was and still is the head of the department. And the other professor I confided in retired the following year and moved to Florida. Probably unrelated, but I can see department politics fixing the issue of poorly taught classes.
First, professors who consistently get good ratings are usually very good lecturers. They are not necessarily easy profs. But they do give great lectures and explain things more thoroughly. On the other hand, professors who get consistently low ratings are usually not good. For example, last term, I took a course with a prof who got 2/5 on ratemyprofessor and her lectures indeed suck although she is a kind person. She doesn't explain the math materials she is teaching; just barely writes down notes on the board. And all the students I have talked to also think she is not a good teacher. The term before I took a course a prof who got 4/5 on ratemyprofessor. She is indeed a great prof and explained everything so clearly. Our class wrote the same exams as the sections but our average was 7 percentage higher overall.
Of course, the ratings from that website may not be equivalent to the ratings profs get from their actual teaching evaluation. But from my experience, I think the students do have the ability to distinguish between good profs and bad profs. And students' ratings are not only based on how easy the course is but also based on how interesting the lectures are and how approachable the prof is.
Does anyone who has an opposite experience from what I have experienced? That is taking a course who a prof who got high ratings on ratemyprofs but felt the prof was bad.
The research, however, says that the student evaluations are negatively correlated with subsequent ability in the subject. In other words, you are repeating the common sense view that is flatly contradicted by careful research.
What should I trust: your anecdata, or published research?
Old people thinking is you learn for 4 years then work at the same company doing the same thing for 43 years and retire with the corporate gold watch. Young people thinking is you learn full time for 4 years and then work while learning part time for 45+ years. For 4 years you have profs who you think you can outsource your responsibility for learning to... and your plan for the following 45+ professor-less years, still have to learn with no one to outsource your responsibility for learning to? Good luck with that.
There is also the missed effect of warped samples because the population is not constant over time. Lazy students either sink or swim and possibly learn to avoid hard profs in the future. Given that selection pressure its hard to imagine hard profs not resulting in better grades later because the sample is self selecting itself away from hard profs or dropping out. Even if there is no difference in educational attainment between hard and soft profs.
If that's "not exactly" the definition of a customer, I'm not sure what is. The students are customers. The real paradox is if they vote for easier teachers, the product they are buying loses its value.
Is the product an education, or a degree?
The university had a rule of never taking these things to court, so they would always settle. Even when it was stupid things like students violating an attendance policy, failing their class because of it, and then getting off scott free beacuse their parents called a lawyer.
Disgusting practice.
The professors who inflate grades (and thus are really the ones that are diminishing educational value) are the ones who would keep their jobs.
I like the place this is coming from (there's zero accountability from students to professors). But such an extreme measure is something I feel would work against the end goal.
In Uni I had to take my final history course and only 1 professor was available. Little did I know at the time...
The man was a hardass. a quiz every single class over the previous classes lecture, you can only make up 3 quizzes, after that it's too bad so sad.
And yet I LOVED the course. People talk about good orators and I had never known one until I met this guy. I was absolutely enthralled every lecture. He was just amazing to listen to, somehow he made what he was talking about seem exciting, it was crazy.
I passed the class with an A and I've never regretted taking that class. I remember it fondly. And I'm the guy that would completely stop going to classes, showing up only for the tests, so that's saying something.
I think it's a terrible idea to start grading professors on by their students evaluation. I think student evaluations are good, but personally I think too many professors already cater to their students, the problem would only get worse. And the ones who are there to learn will get left behind.
Perhaps professors should work for tips too /s
That way teaching for a large amount of academic professors is just a side-job, and comes secondary in the pecking order to researching itself. I'm specifically targeting Management/Business courses in the UK.
Now you see why student evaluations are used. We can suffer the consequences of this disconnect between incentives and foci of an academic, and that becomes problematic.
Most academics need to be kept in check, and connected to the realities of how the students experience their course, in terms of "support available"; "clarity" etc.
I see the grades in Iowa elevating and the market-value of a degree from Iowa discounting. You get an A! You get an A! You get an A! You ALL GET AN "A"!!!!
i once had a PhD student as lecturer in an advanced track course -- we bumped into him at a bar one saturday...this guy was jumping all over the tables, drunk and wasted out of his damn mind...
now i did have some amazing profs but those were all tenured.
To be honest, I only bothered to rate professors because I couldn't see my final grades until I did so. Consequently, only the very excellent and the very terrible really got any kind of response.
Let the students fire the TAs. Not like they get paid anyway.
1. Professors raise bar sometimes which students find difficult to cope with and result in low feedback
2. Some students try to "hit" professors with low grades since they are not interested in them
3. More work by professors means low grades from students
This is what usually happens in India and I am a professor
1. Part of raising the bar should be making sure students understand that you are doing it and are into it. Also by saying "raising the bar" you are implying that they are going above what the rest of the university is doing. Which is an indictment of the university not of the students. 2. Why aren't they interested in them? Could it be because they are not good? 3. So professors should be able to assign any amount of work that they deem fit? If its a 2-credit course with the workload of a 4-credit course then the professor is bad. If its a 4-credit class and other 4-credit classes have significantly less work, then the university is screwing up. If the its a 4-credit course with a lot more work than other 4-credit courses then that should probably be clearly conveyed up front or have some mechanism for conveying that.
It succeeded to a degree, especially with regard to the sheer number of different artistic positions that get to be represented at a small university. It is not without fault however - the quality of teaching is not constant; after a professor leaves there is oftentimes a semester of emptiness until a new one arrives.
And while the students can not fire a professor, they have a vote in the committee that decides which person to hire as the next professor.
Students are attending to learn and will give negative reviews when they are not learning as much as they expected they would learn.
Depends very much on the course. A lot courses are attended by a lot of students who just need the course to fulfill some requirement and want nothing more than to get a pass with as little work as possible.
I admire your optimism but I just don't think that's true in even half the cases.
This could apply outside philosophy. I sat thru some chemistry classes that bordered on performance art working thru endless examples of problems in class. I think I pretty much learned quantitative chemical analysis by osmosis just watching the prof work problems. I still remember endless buffer solutions puzzles over 20 years later. Also ochem lab was self explanatory, its a practical lab class nothing more, from memory there was no lecture component beyond "this is the fire extinguisher, here is the safety shower, here is the eye wash station" etc. This could probably be extended to CS/IT classes, somehow.
For some classes, students stopped going to class and studied on their own.
Who even uses the word "hobo?"
To be fair I was going through a faze where I was carrying my things around in a bandana tied on a stick... ;-)
Seeing as the admissions dept has already done all the work of filtering applicants to select the right ones, sure, why not.
May as well issue the degree at admission time, skip the dog and pony show of 4 years of attendance. It'll have little to no effect on outcomes in non-vocational fields.
The vocational fields don't belong at uni/college anyway, they belong at vo-tech schools just like welding or diesel repair.
In other news, a friend's wife here in Australia was an XO at a Navy training base. He told me that the base brought in a 'soccer card' system where the recruits could card the drill sergeants and make them face disciplinary action. This didn't take long to completely undermine the ability to make the recruits learn anything and waste the CO's time with meaningless disciplinary hearings, and was turfed out in short order.