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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

#121

Post by Fomite »

waterpigcow wrote: post #53
travisoneill1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The student fees and tuition are mostly paid for by government backed student loans. There really isn't any private education in the US past high school.

I don't see the government paying for my college... In my experience a majority of my friends have or are on track to have student debt from having to pay for college.

Technically you wouldn't see it even if it was there. For most public universities, it comes as a direct allocation from the state legislature to the university.

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

#122

Post by Fomite »

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.

We know we get reviewed anyway.

What we're pushing back against is these reviews getting turned into yet another semi-useless, noisy and biased metric we're evaluated by.

You want to recommend for/against a class to your friends? Don't care. What I'm not interested in is my dean pretending there's deep insight there.

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

#123

Post by sonnyblarney »

In my experience this has been good for weeding out really bad profs. At my Grad school they turfed a prof 1/2 way through that was bones bad.

That said - it's perverse at the other end and I do believe that there is unconscious sexism.

We had a really smart bunch of people, and some of the female teachers were a little more apprehensive in front of us which I think signals to people subconsciously.

Another way: the feedback has to be interpreted.

I suggest that the profs should not be 'graded' by students - rather there should just be an open ended opportunity for feedback.

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

#124

Post by faissaloo »

avani wrote: post #88

Student reviews are also ridiculously sexist in the average case. In a recent study, the students rated identical teachers differently enough by gender that actual teaching performance was lost in the noise: https://academic.oup.com/jeea/advance-article-abstract/doi/1... Another pair of studies showed that identical courses where students thought instructors were male rated higher than those that had a female profess…

Or maybe the women were actually just worse...

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

#126

Post by Fomite »

dragonwriter wrote: post #23
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.

> American colleges more resemble four-year all-inclusive resorts than they do rigorous institutions of higher learning. I've been to both American colleges and all-inclusive resorts and, no, they don't.

Answering emails from students while at an all-inclusive resort made this comment particularly funny.

And yeah, they really don't.

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

#127

Post by Fomite »

baroffoos wrote: post #72
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…

If this is the case, it's exceedingly good training for a number of fields, including the professoriate.

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

#128

Post by Fomite »

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.

Grading on a curve statistically should mean that a fixed number of my students must fail my course.

...I don't really accept that.

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

#129

Post by Fomite »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #12

An 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 pr…

> Often times, time and experience give a different perspective on how valuable something was.

Indeed. I'm a professor in a STEM field.

One of the most valuable courses I ever took was in medieval feminist art history.

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

#130

Post by AndyMcConachie »

wisty wrote: post #118

There's a much better way to hold educators to account - have other educators sit in on classes. But this is often very strongly resisted, apparently it's 'unprofessional'.

I'd be curious to hear who thinks this is unprofessional. Not any educators I know.
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