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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

#71

Post by flashman »

katsura wrote: post #33

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"…

> as students are graded on their studying skills, I feel like teachers should be graded every fews years on their teaching skills

If a teacher grades a student poorly, there can be repercussions. They have an incentive to grade fairly and accurately. The same isn't true of students, who can grade on feelings and grudges.

Teachers are also subject matter experts in the material being graded. Students aren't trained as educators, so why would they be any good at evaluating their teachers?

Student evaluations lack even the smallest part of the rigor that they should contain. They are practically worthless.

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

#72

Post by baroffoos »

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.

In my experience uni was a place of memorizing endless lists of pointless rules. Better reserve an hour a day just combing pdfs and the website working out which font to use or if the marker prefers camel case or snake case. Just focusing on learning won't get you anywhere because you can lose almost all of your marks because you missed a few of the formatting rules in the complex 40 page spec sheet for a python game of hangman or maybe you didn't comment every single line.

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

#73

Post by joe_the_user »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #63
joe_the_user wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Well, to be honest, I really wish everyone who wants to one more hurdle in front of teachers should understand the correlation between bad teaching and teachers having a low-paid, unrewarding and effectively abusive job.…

There is something to what you are saying but it is also true that many many aspiring teachers wash out because they can't even get their first job after getting their teaching degree. It _is_ a competitive market in many places but the market _isn't_ functioning as it should because of dysfunctional relationships with unions and tenure.

It _is_ a competitive market in many places but the market _isn't_ functioning as it should because of dysfunctional relationships with unions and tenure.

Unions? Really? Not administrators and profit institutions cutting college teachers' salaries to the bone, creating a situation adjunct professors literally starve to death in the process. No, unions. And tenure is your other complaint? The job guarantee that no longer applies to most college teachers today. Why not complain that the average teach still is able to sleep at night and has roof over their head?

Okay then.

Unions have their flaws but it was that way well before the current disastrous regime.

And sure, teaching is competitive market because even with all the horrors, lots of people want to teach because it's something to believe in, in this horrible and the bureaucracy, that unions are at best a junior partner in, do make it hard.

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

#74

Post by eastWestMath »

olliej wrote: post #4

No shit basing compensation on reviews by people who have an overt bias to blame the instructor. The purpose of the review should be purely to provide feedback to the instructor and TA. It should not be available to the administration - the purpose is to help the TA and instructors improve their teaching. Especially if the instructors have tenure and so can’t be fired for failing to teach. Ratings should also be scal…

My university explicitly rewards TAs with high reviews. I swear I’ve walked in on people handing out assignment solutions.

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

#75

Post by baroffoos »

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."

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if uni for tech becomes a thing of the past. Uni didn't teach me anything I didn't already know from working on personal projects and im fairly sure my public git repos had far more effect in job interviews than uni did. I have talked to others who have finished and they hardly know anything compared to those I know who are self taught.

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

#76

Post by baroffoos »

have_faith wrote: post #18
ccleve wrote: post #14

If 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

Some of them get marked terribly because they made a spelling mistake on a page or some other trivial difference.

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

#77

Post by joe_the_user »

cimmanom wrote: post #40
the_jeremy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s why you don’t use the threshold to trigger anything more punitive than further investigation.

And by "you", you mean "no one ever". Teacher evaluations have immediate and universal impact. There is essentially no filter and no interpretation on this. It's like tweets. Once a social signal is out-there, public, everyone is acting on the implications regardless of hypothetical mitigating factors.

A lot of people talk about this stuff in the abstract, as some hypothetical, like we'll do this and we'll have safeguards in place. The news is, this is how things have been for college teachers for a while. You get an evaluation and it has an impact and there's no mitigation and no contextualizing.

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

#78

Post by currymj »

ccleve wrote: post #14

If 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.

I don't think it would make it any easier to compare schools. I'm fairly certain a 30th percentile student at Caltech could go to Directional State University and be at the top of the equivalent class.

People trying to judge students based on grades would then have to have a rough sense of how the institution works and how a grade should be interpreted.

But this is what they have to do anyway, curve or not. For example, employers already know that a B- at an Ivy League institution is a somewhat poor grade. (At Harvard, 75% of all grades given are B+ or above.)

Admittedly I think the Ivy League system (which effectively is grading on a curve, just a very narrow one with the mean set to an A-) is pretty good. There's certainly little incentive for students to want easy classes, because in terms of grading there is basically no difference between an easy class and a hard class. It's as close as you can come to just not giving grades at all, but doesn't mark you out as a weird hippy school.

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

#79

Post by Spooky23 »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #63
joe_the_user wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Well, to be honest, I really wish everyone who wants to one more hurdle in front of teachers should understand the correlation between bad teaching and teachers having a low-paid, unrewarding and effectively abusive job.…

There is something to what you are saying but it is also true that many many aspiring teachers wash out because they can't even get their first job after getting their teaching degree. It _is_ a competitive market in many places but the market _isn't_ functioning as it should because of dysfunctional relationships with unions and tenure.

Not really.

It’s a very cyclical market as cohorts of graduates coming out of school wax and wane due to birth rates and the economy. All government or teaching jobs are that way — their fiscal woes lag the economy and they tend to pick up better employees when companies blow up.

Blaming unions like citing the boogeyman. It’s almost always the lazy answer that doesn’t pan out.

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

#80

Post by Palomides »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #66
IggleSniggle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to teach in academia. Student reviews are REALLY easy to game. Give everyone As for doing nothing, and most will give you As for just being entertaining. It doesn’t matter if they learn anything, or worse, if they learn the wrong things.

It is 2018, these patterns are _easy_ to detect. Honestly at a fundamental level bailing on optimizing teach performance and student outcomes through feedback loops seems nuts to me. This is how all high functioning dynamic systems work (ok maybe not all). You just can't throw out the baby with the bathwater here just because there are things to figure out. Most of the reasons people have cited here seem like lame ex…

the same thing happens with doctors when you make satisfaction/results stats public: surgeons, for example, are more likely to refuse to take on difficult cases, and prefer easy ones which will increase their patient satisfaction; or even the best surgeons get stuck with the hardest cases, which tanks their relative outcomes.
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