101–110 of 244 posts
> I got a terrible rating, and its publication humiliated me.
While this doesn't mean that the article can't make valid points, large parts of it also complain about "today's youth".
I suspect this got upvoted mostly based on the contrarian headline...
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I’ve found that the best professors tend to come with higher standards for grading, more involved assignments, and just generally more work involved. This is great if you’re actively interested in learning the subject; most students are not. In which case, its far worse than the shitty teacher, and its reflected in the feedback. From the perspective of most students, the ideal professor has low grading standards, “go…
One of the best classes that I had was very hard in homeworks but was easy on the grading. It was literature and art class taught by a lawyer. I felt that I grew up a bit after that class. The class was also rated high by students
Undergrad feedback I wouldn’t trust at all regardless of major, Masters is major-dependent (ce, cs are particularly screwed) and phd candidates are probably fine. Simply by looking at the why the general population is even in the major (eg ask an undergrad and the reason is probably not actual interest in the subject: parents, jobs, money, dropout-major, couldn’t decide, best grades in hs, etc). Their feedback will naturally reflect the misaligned incentives
If your interest in feedback is to make sure the teachers are actually good at teaching, anyways.
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 a…
Yes, but the above poster was talking about TEACHING poorly. It is easy enough to expect students to know things at the end of class, but harder to be of use in them learning that material.
> Teachers are also subject matter experts in the material being graded.
Some are. Maybe even most. But definitely not a universally true statement, particularly in areas where teacher pay is dramatically out of line with industry wages.
> Students aren't trained as educators, so why would they be any good at evaluating their teachers?
Fair point. But as pointed out by others, there are few other forms of evaluation/accountability. And while a student may not be able to identify WHY they struggled to learn, they can certainly evaluate IF they did. If many students agree, that's a problem best addressed quickly.
I teach a university class (just one, my day job is coding) and I've been utterly amazed at the lack of accountability applied to me and my peers. Meanwhile I have friends that teach teens, and the bureaucracy and policies they must follow seem just as bad, but in the opposite direction.
If you have a good alternative to student evaluations, please share, otherwise I'll agree with the flaws you listed but still find them better to have than not.
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…
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…
You think that's bad, try being instructor of record for a remedial math course as a TA.
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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 lo…
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Experienced quality teachers are impossible to match...but experienced jaded teachers are easier to find (it is grueling to try and improve students away from dumb mistakes before you can even teach your material, only to start from scratch semester after semester.)
Standardized testing attempts to fix this, but....let's just say the math teachers (or anyone with an understanding of statistics) did not get a say in how they are used. Teachers that get a "bad class" (higher number of poor or unwilling learners) face serious impacts to their career success.
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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.…
True - stricter performance evaluations aren't going to solve problems caused by a poor hiring pool.
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 a…
A few negative evaluations based on personal disputes can be expected. If there are grudges or strong feelings among a large enough proportion of students to meaningfully influence the aggregates, then something really is wrong.
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Are you talking universities or K12? Because everything the parent said is true in K12. Spend 10 minutes at a Jersey City School Board meeting and you’ll see just how aggressive the union is if you even hint at reform. Can’t speak to higher ed though, except tenure for classroom instructors is a real problem. Since they have absolutely zero incentive to be good teachers but instead only engaging in activities that br…
The OP is about college teaching and what I've written is applicable to that. Folks seem to have segued to K12 for some anti-union speechifying in the meantime. As far as that goes, look at the condition of teachers in Kentucky if you think unions are the problem. Unions have a fairly inflexible response to most "reform" plans but the problem is most reform plans, as can be seen here, aim to make teacher more insecur…
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.
For starters, the quality of students is not uniform across universities. Middle of the pack at Harvard is a very different thing from middle of the pack at a party school. To get a useful ordering, you'd need to give every CS graduate the same standardized test, like the bar exam.
I had taught two semesters of a basic pharmacy course at a local community college. Of the 20 or so student reviews I received, 80% of them mentioned my 'ta-tas'. Enough said.