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

141–150 of 244 posts

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

#141

Post by [deleted] »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #114
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…

students rated identical teachers Did you actually read critically the papers you cite? [1] claims to be comparing "identical teachers" but [1]'s sole claim to courses taught by male and female instructors is " neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor’s gender ". Clearly those are hardly the only factors relevant to teacher quality. Moreover [1] claims to use "objective measure of…

[deleted]

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

#142

Post by pas »

closeparen wrote: post #107
flashman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Students are the only people who can really evaluate the quality of teaching. Someone with a pre-existing understanding of the material cannot tell whether the class can successfully communicate it to a fresh mind. 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 som…

If other teachers prepared the tests from a shared curriculum for the students, and grading would be by the book (the book would be a living document amended as edge cases arise), then teaching performance could be assessed via the test scores.

I have seen this work well for the end of highschool test (prepared every half year), participated on the mailing list purely as an observer (where teachers discussed edge cases - and there was/is a process to get official guidance from the test writer group, but not directly, so that provides a bit of blinding against biases).

As long as we try to let teachers cope by themselves (and maybe give them a few TAs in higher ed), and don't make their work testable, we're bound to have wild theories fueled by anecdata.

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

#143

Post by paulie_a »

Fomite wrote: post #122
paulie_a wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can understand that perspective about being used as a metric to the dean, but as a student I would have loved access to that info. It's kind like any other review system, a couple of bad reviews among many high reviews, you take that into account. but a lot of bad reviews, I'm probably going to avoid that professor, restaurant, product, service etc.

It should not be used as precise metric of performance, but as a general trend overall. Instead of one friend giving a bad review for whatever reason, now I have access to the hundreds of bad experiences or the 99/100 good experiences.

As a student I really don't care about the dean professor relationship. I am a paying customer of the institution. I want to know if that professor is worth taking their class.

Also if you don't care about students giving praise/negative reviews to a friend, that kind of says something.

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

#144

Post by pas »

khawkins wrote: post #100
gdsimoes wrote: post #96

One of the main problems with the educational system is that students are evaluated by the same person that teaches them. If the teacher wasn’t the one grading the mean grade of the students would be a decent evaluation of the performance of teacher.

If another professor wrote the exams for a class they didn't sit in, you'd have the students screaming in unison, "this wasn't discussed in class!" Not exactly disagreeing with the idea, but students have been normalized to the idea that, with enough studying and concentration, any exam can be aced. When they feel like they've been cheated by the system they get discouraged, making a harmful learning experience.

Pretty small price to get fair evaluations.

Furthermore it forces teachers to communicate the requurements, the curriculum and sillabus well to the exam writers and graders.

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

#145

Post by nocobot »

I'm a CS student in Germany and contrary to the authors claim we actually do evaluate teachers (to be fair that might not have been common place when she was teaching).

This is obviously anecdotal but in my experience these ratings seem to reflect my perceived quality of the lectures quite well.

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

#146

Post by enriquto »

kiriakasis wrote: post #137
enriquto wrote: post #125

As a teacher, I disagree strongly with the conclusions of this article. Anonymous student evaluations are an invaluable tool to improve my teaching. The students say so many fair and useful things!

I think the problem is when student evaluation have an affect (positive or negative) on the teacher career.

Yes, when that measure becomes a target it may have some unintended consequences. But the device is too useful to be discarded for that reason.

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

#147

Post by snailletters »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #114
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…

students rated identical teachers Did you actually read critically the papers you cite? [1] claims to be comparing "identical teachers" but [1]'s sole claim to courses taught by male and female instructors is " neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor’s gender ". Clearly those are hardly the only factors relevant to teacher quality. Moreover [1] claims to use "objective measure of…

> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

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

#148

Post by anticensor »

olliej wrote: post #9
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…

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…

> they by design don’t provide prior exams

Do they reuse past questions forever? That is a bad practice. Each term's exams need to be equivalent but different.

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

#149

Post by pas »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #134

This is the age-old doctor question. You go to the doctor's office because you have a medical problem. Doctor 1 comes in on-time, she's smart, capable, friendly, and spends a good amount of time concerned about you and your situation. Doctor 2 comes in late, she's irascible, pedantic, hurried, and only listens long enough to tell you what to do. She also insults you and your family in various ways and doesn't seem to…

It's not like there can't be an accurate way to measure this.

Pre-register patient problems, and see how fast doctors solve problems on average/median. Then it doesn't matter how jovial/amicable the doc is.

With enough data you can fish out potential signals (and then test them properly), maybe bedside manner really doesn't matter, maybe being on time is more important. (Because then people spend less time in the clinic among other sick people.)

And as others mentioned the teacher eval problem can be solved by splitting the lecturer, exam writer and grader roles. (Grading should be done by a book written as edge cases accumulate, edge cases should be handled without names to prevent bias, as much as possible.) And then aggregate stats can be published about each class and school.

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

#150

Post by pas »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #86

Possible alternative method is to hire and train students to be observers, both covert and overt. Put them into classes as if they were students, and those students Would then Evaluate that professor. It could work especially cross colleges, where those students will never naturally take classes by that professor.

Around here the student associations have seats on the accreditation bodies and they do indeed sit on in classes as they tour the county.

I don't think this is effective, but it happens.

Post reply on HN