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Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

alexandercoward.com

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Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#61

Post by laxatives »

VanillaSwirl wrote: post #36

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…

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.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#62

Post by narsil »

bpicolo wrote: post #25
dwaxe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He'll have more students (and therefore more total impact) at a large public school. Also, maybe the goal is to change the expectation that research universities lack good teachers? Public colleges educate many times more students than private ones, let alone small liberal arts schools.

UC Berkeley IS a large, public school.

Seems like dwaxe knows that and was suggesting why the OP would prefer Berkeley over a smaller school.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#63

Post by VanillaSwirl »

cellar_door wrote: post #59
VanillaSwirl wrote: post #36

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…

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 mat…

$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.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#64

Post by joshAg »

laxatives wrote: post #47

I graduated from Cal in 2013 in Physics and CS. I had a full time lecturer (not a professor) for a course in Analytic Mechanics and the teacher (Charman) was in a similar situation. Despite having ratings well above average and being immensely popular, he was let go. It seems like lecturers are treated as second class citizens, much like contract workers or outsourced positions.

Lecturers are Cal's version of adjunt professors. Just like how GSIs are Cal's version of TAs.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#65

Post by greenyoda »

probdist wrote: post #40
hugh4 wrote: post #2

I'm not sure if "complaining about getting fired" counts as "whistleblowing". I'm not necessarily inclined to take this guy's side of the dispute just because I read it first.

Indeed. It actually puts UC Berkeley in a pretty horrible position by going public like this. It does not look good for employers to have the same kind of public litany of complaints against an employee. Some things stand out from a quick skim of the personnel file/included complaint. Among these: he did not practically assign homework or have regular quizzes. This was noted as not being consistent with department no…

"It actually _is_ of value to have consistency between multiple sections of introductory classes and as preparation for follow on classes in the same sequences (e.g Calc 1, 2 3 having similar structures in class organization)"

Apparently, learning the material better is more important to future success than consistency: the students in his classes did better in the following classes by .17 grade points than students from other (presumably more consistent) classes.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#66

Post by solveforall »

If what he Dr. Coward says is true, and I have no reason to doubt him, this makes me sad as a Berkeley alum. I remember taking Math 53 with an awful professor who could barely speak English and refused to cover the material, asking us to just read the material ourselves and ask him questions. This professor had been there for many years despite repeatedly getting in trouble for failing too many students (that he neglected to teach). This is unfortunately the state of universities now, teaching is nothing, research is everything. Lecturers are treated like crap and barely scraping by. I wonder when the devaluation of teaching will catch up to us; maybe another country that values teachers will be able to attract more of the best students in the world.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#67

Post by hendzen »

VanillaSwirl wrote: post #36

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…

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

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#68

Post by Ar-Curunir »

jathak wrote: post #49
VanillaSwirl wrote: post #36

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…

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 an…

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

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#70

Post by VanillaSwirl »

laxatives wrote: post #61
VanillaSwirl wrote: post #36

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…

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).

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