Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

chronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 244 posts

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#31

Post by the_jeremy »

azhenley wrote: post #22
thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the meaning of your grade is that it gets compared to their grade.

Says who? Why can't it be used to evaluate my individual learning/effort? Grades only make sense to compare within the same class at the same university during the same semester.

Grades are relative to other people. That's the point of places asking for GPA. If you were just evaluating your effort / learning, your grades could just say "learned a lot" or "made a good effort". But GPA is a way to discriminate between potential candidates for schools/businesses, and thus needs to be quantifiable and comparable.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#32

Post by novia »

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #7
rb808 wrote: post #5

My best advice I got about college teaching: University is a place of higher learning, not higher teaching. If you're relying on being spoon fed the course, you're doing it wrong.

What exactly are universities selling in that case? From an individual standpoint, sure, a student is always well-advised to take charge of their own learning process. But if you can do that, what do you need a university for? At this point I'm pretty sure the answer boils down to "a piece of paper and a dating pool."

BaaS (Boss as a Service)

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#33

Post by katsura »

To be honest, I'm not sure how teachers get and keep their jobs, but as students are graded on their studying skills, I feel like teachers should be graded every fews years on their teaching skills.

My girlfriend is studying in a distance university, so she basically never meets any of her teachers. This year she has to do practices at a chosen company, and she got a teacher assigned to her who is supposed to "help" her. In her study guides it is written that the teacher has to give her classes every week. After first contact the teacher said that she will give every information by email (or other kind of online communication), and won't waste the students' precious time with classes. At first this sounded awesome, because my girlfriend has a lot to do in her last year. BUT... Since then 2 months have passed, the teacher has been repeatedly asked to keep at least a few classes, because things are not moving forward. She ignores her messages for days, answers in very short sentences, and although it is mandatory for her to keep the classes, she is always "busy" at those times and doesn't offer any other dates, so it is impossible to meet her. My girlfriend spends crazy hours combing through PDFs hoping to find information on how to do her practices, what she should prepare, how to write her work diary, etc.

And the other day, when she tried to contact the teacher's higher-ups to do something about this, one guy basically shouted at her, on the phone, saying that she is making her teacher look bad, even though the said theacher works really hard, and she should just listen to the teacher and let her be. After some of this preaching he just put the phone down.

It has been a really frustrating experience for us.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#34

Post by dragonwriter »

sdinsn wrote: post #26
waterpigcow wrote: post #24

It is my suspicion that the attitude of american students towards their professors is perhaps a function of the privatization of schools. since students are paying for their education they feel entitled to a good grade regardless of performance. I would like to know others thoughts on this. I don't know much about post secondary education in Europe but it seems different from the American collegiate system somehow.

> privatization of schools Hmm? There has always been private schools. Nothing is new about them

Over the last several decades, US public colleges and universities have generally seen a declining share of funding from the chartering governments, relying more on business activity plus student fees.

This is probably what is being referred to.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#35

Post by the_jeremy »

cimmanom wrote: post #8
gonehome wrote: post #3

I'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…

Tying them directly indeed seems like a bad idea (like pretty much any other naive reputation score), but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on the feedback mechanism. Just set a threshold - such as “scores an average of < 4/10”. If the score is below that threshold, invest a little more time and effort into getting more detailed evaluations and figuring out why the score is low and whether it’s a genuine problem…

Strict thresholds don't usually work. My school had public metrics, and teachers preferred classes made a huge difference. The teachers that taught the harder classes (component design rings a bell) always got significantly lower scores than the ones teaching easier classes (physics I, circuits for Mechanical Engineers)

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#36

Post by monksy »

paulie_a wrote: post #10
Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #6

We 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.

The things on word of mouth aren't things that the professor would consider anyways.

Personality, difficulty, ability to teach (relatively), understanding the student's pressures etc.

When I say difficulty, I mean easiness (people take the class to improve the gpa) or difficulty as in: the professor wants to make an example.

Student's pressures: Does the professor demand more than a reasonable amount of time from the student?

----

All of this being said: I haven't seen a pragmatically taught course before. (As in the professor looks at the course as a means and is the person that helps facilitate the student through it) I think that's what students really look for.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#37

Post by edw »

Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #27
edw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Students aren't reviewing the quality of their campus on-site gym when they review their professor. There's genuine concerns that should be reasonably heard. One example is slowness in grading homework/exams/etc. What happens is professors get backlogged, and you have multiple homework/exams and the student missed on understanding some concept they were later graded on. If the student had regular grade updates, they…

I remember with fondness a professor of mine who drove mad some of my classmates by basically only grading papers on demand, due undoubtedly to some of what you’be mentioned undoubtedly.

Classes may be what students take when they go to college, but I always thought of them more as ice-breakers for the forming of relationships with instructors and fellow students and a way to foster a community of intellectual enquiry.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#38

Post by Y7ZCQtNo39 »

shanghaiaway wrote: post #29
Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #6

We 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…

Like with healthcare recipients, students don't necessarily know what they need and therefore aren't able to accurately rate providers.

In some aspects yes, in others no.

I accidentally cut myself a little too deep while doing dishes a couple years ago (opaque, soapy water and sharp surfaces don't mix well). I couldn't get the bleeding to stop (without constant pressure held for about an hour), so I went to urgent care. I knew that I needed stitches or that "glue" they use to seal wounds. I didn't care which solution the Doctor picked, but I knew I needed something.

Students have some sense of what a generally good instructional experience looks like. It's better to collect this feedback, and have people that are experts in instruction examine the reviews, synthesize with their own knowledge of what makes instruction great, and use that information to improve.

But saying we should totally close out students since "they don't know what they need" removes a fruitful data source in determining where professors can improve.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#39

Post by azhenley »

the_jeremy wrote: post #31
azhenley wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says who? Why can't it be used to evaluate my individual learning/effort? Grades only make sense to compare within the same class at the same university during the same semester.

Grades are relative to other people. That's the point of places asking for GPA. If you were just evaluating your effort / learning, your grades could just say "learned a lot" or "made a good effort". But GPA is a way to discriminate between potential candidates for schools/businesses, and thus needs to be quantifiable and comparable.

Some schools have found how useless GPAs are and have adopted narrative evaluations [1].

The grading in my course is not relative. I set a rubric that I assess each individual on. Sure, within the class you can compare grades, but I wouldn't say it is particularly meaningful. Comparing between classes or universities is completely meaningless.

People just want a simple number that can accurately represent someone's knowledge/learning/skill/effort, but it doesn't exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_evaluation

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#40

Post by cimmanom »

the_jeremy wrote: post #35
cimmanom wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tying them directly indeed seems like a bad idea (like pretty much any other naive reputation score), but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on the feedback mechanism. Just set a threshold - such as “scores an average of < 4/10”. If the score is below that threshold, invest a little more time and effort into getting more detailed evaluations and figuring out why the score is low and whether it’s a genuine problem…

Strict thresholds don't usually work. My school had public metrics, and teachers preferred classes made a huge difference. The teachers that taught the harder classes (component design rings a bell) always got significantly lower scores than the ones teaching easier classes (physics I, circuits for Mechanical Engineers)

That’s why you don’t use the threshold to trigger anything more punitive than further investigation. And sure, tune the threshold to the department. But also consider that maybe teaching is better on average in some departments than others. (For instance, the drop-off in teaching quality from high school to college in my experience was enormous in math and arts but slight in both sciences and humanities. Which seems to me more like a problem with the math and art departments’ approaches to hiring or teaching than with math or arts as subjects.)
Post reply on HN