I would also assume that the students, taken as an average, would also be some of the worst qualified people to evaluate educators, pretty much by definition.
Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students
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Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students
#12An interesting way to evaluate professors would be to contact alumni who have graduated and ask them about the professors that they remember. Chances are that the really good and the really bad will stand out. I still remember my calculus professor and statistics professor who both did a great job. I remember some other professors on the other hand who were bad at teaching undergraduates. My opinions on my college professors seems independent of the grade I received or how hard the class was.
Often times, time and experience give a different perspective on how valuable something was.
Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students
#13I was a visiting professor in a local university for a while. The student evaluations were directly proportional to the grades - easier courses = better grades. I refused to see the evaluations and refused to discuss them with my supervisor, it was pointless. BTW my long-term relationship with ex-students is great, at least with the ones I care about.
Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students
#14If the school would force teachers to grade on a curve, the problem would go away. Teachers would have only a limited budget of high grades to give away.
Grading on a curve is not without problems, particularly when class sizes are small, but it has a lot of benefits. It makes it easier to compare students across schools when the schools use the same curve.
Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students
#15I'm pretty skeptical of the claims in this - it'd be interesting to see actual data. Evaluations are one of the extremely few levers students actually have to pull when dealing with a terrible teacher. I'd expect that given an entire class' worth of evaluations you'd be able to strip outliers and get some genuine useful responses. Though the worst professor I had at RPI held our grades hostage until the evaluations w…
In America teachers get tenure so your feedback has no impact on them improving. Also if you look at literally any study of them TAs for harder courses get harsher ratings, they get harsher ratings from weaker students. I also spent a number of years as a TA I can say anecdotally that is my exact first hand experience - good reviews in easy courses like graphics, atrocious scores in design of concurrent systems. In f…
Very few professors are granted tenure, as was the case in the past. It's weakly non-zero: times have changed. There are far more adjunct professors today. Universities are more run like businesses than in decades past.
Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students
#16If the school would force teachers to grade on a curve, the problem would go away. Teachers would have only a limited budget of high grades to give away. Grading on a curve is not without problems, particularly when class sizes are small, but it has a lot of benefits. It makes it easier to compare students across schools when the schools use the same curve.
That is a horrible idea. Then students will try to take courses with weak students. Oh, that smart group is taking CS340 next semester? Guess I'll wait until the following semester. Do not turn it into even more of a competition than it already is.
Why should someone else's ability influence my grade???
Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students
#17We pushed very hard at my alma mater to publicize course/teacher evaluations. We eventually got the University to accept iff a minimum participation rate was met (on a per course basis-- so it wasn't all or nothing. We'd get a subset of the data when enough participation occurred. We considered this reasonable, since if very few students participate, the data isn't all that meaningful). Regarding professors wanting t…
If anything you would think professors would welcome reviews. They already get reviewed anyways. It's just word of mouth. At least a student could see a much wider range of opinions vs one person's experience.
We made our own review system, to compete with the contracted-out system they used for their siloed data we didn't have access to.
We agreed to not launch the system, in exchange for limited access to the data, as I described above.
Professors en masse opposed opening up this data. That opposition alone made me feel we were doing good work. If they had to stand by their public reviews, hopefully they could stand by the quality of the instructional experience provided.
I ended up making a startup to deal with issues like this, to sell SaaS solutions directly to student governance groups, rather than to institutions. Both control fairly significant budgets (student governance groups at mid-to-large sized institutions have 6/7 figure budgets to easily afford enterprise pricing). My platforms are student-first. It's more a passion project than trying to get me Zuckerberg levels of wealth.
Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students
#18If the school would force teachers to grade on a curve, the problem would go away. Teachers would have only a limited budget of high grades to give away. Grading on a curve is not without problems, particularly when class sizes are small, but it has a lot of benefits. It makes it easier to compare students across schools when the schools use the same curve.
How does that work if all the students are very similar in ability? maybe I misunderstand the concept
Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students
#19We pushed very hard at my alma mater to publicize course/teacher evaluations. We eventually got the University to accept iff a minimum participation rate was met (on a per course basis-- so it wasn't all or nothing. We'd get a subset of the data when enough participation occurred. We considered this reasonable, since if very few students participate, the data isn't all that meaningful). Regarding professors wanting t…
American colleges more resemble four-year all-inclusive resorts than they do rigorous institutions of higher learning.
Serving someone well doesn’t necessarily mean making them happy. Students — people who by enrolling at an institution in a course of study admit their ignorance of that domain — do not seem to me good judges of an instructor qua instructor.
Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students
#20If the school would force teachers to grade on a curve, the problem would go away. Teachers would have only a limited budget of high grades to give away. Grading on a curve is not without problems, particularly when class sizes are small, but it has a lot of benefits. It makes it easier to compare students across schools when the schools use the same curve.
That is a horrible idea. Then students will try to take courses with weak students. Oh, that smart group is taking CS340 next semester? Guess I'll wait until the following semester. Do not turn it into even more of a competition than it already is. Why should someone else's ability influence my grade???
Because the meaning of your grade is that it gets compared to their grade.