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

181–190 of 244 posts

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

#181

Post by wahern »

closeparen wrote: post #109
the_jeremy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, not at all. GPA tells the difference between "mastered the material" and "did well enough not to get expelled" which can be a useful signal for an employer, but universities and professors don't view it as their responsibility to sort students for industry's needs. 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 p…

Grades are relative to other people in your school and program; it's why you mention the institution on the resume. And IME you don't often communicate your grade but your class rank, most notably if you're at the very top (valedictorian, etc); even with grade inflation schools still must be able to differentiate the very top students from everybody else so they can actually provide these honors. You can't graduate an entire class of "top" students, no matter how earnestly they studied.

With few exceptions there is no mastering the material, or at least there shouldn't be. Not in college. There's always more complex material you can use to differentiate students. When you grade on a curve the test should be difficult enough that even the best students will typically get at least one question wrong, with most students falling along a nice bell distribution. (I say most because it's probably better to err on the side of a handful of students clustering at the top rather than at the bottom, especially if the bottom means flunking out.)

This can be more difficult for smaller, seminar style classes. One solution is giving the professor leeway to shift up and tighten the curve so he's not forced to give Fs or Ds. These classes are usually in the latter years of a program, particularly in undergraduate, where it's less important to winnow students out and ensure challenging curriculums.

That latter point is important. If you don't enforce some sort of statistical distribution how can you gauge the quality of your curriculum? If everybody is getting As is that because all your students are smart and disciplined, or because the material is too simple? If you require a bell distribution, then the curriculum will by necessity be a good fit for your cohort of students. In this way a university can maintain a quality curriculum without having to resort to external metrics or comparisons with other schools.

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

#182

Post by sethammons »

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…

Our evals led to the dismissal of a professor. She was absolutely gorgeous, and a delight to talk to. And couldn't convey account proceedures worth a damn. That is what the students cared about in our case.

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

#183

Post by thatcat »

dual_basis wrote: post #173
JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main idea here is that student evaluations only make sense if we assume that students are actually interested in acquiring knowledge, competences, or values, however if their main aim in a course is a good grade then their evaluations suddenly hold little value since they will rate "easy" instructors highest.

When I was a college instructor I found that when I tried hard - putting a lot of thought into pedagogy, having weekly (open notes) quizzes, assigning challenging but fair homework - I got terrible evaluations, even though the average grade in my class was higher than other teachers who were teaching the same course. When I phoned it in, didn't really try, was very lax with the homework and often made the quizzes tak…

Did your reviews not ask for justification of the ratings?

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

#184

Post by vonmoltke »

snailletters wrote: post #147
YorkshireSeason wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

This has nothing to do with the article. This has to do with sources the poster chose as evidence to support a position. It is definitely relevant to question whether a poster has read and understood their own citations, particularly when those citations are not very good or contradict the poster.

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

#185

Post by bradleyjg »

JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #167
xtrapolate wrote: post #159

> "A teacher (also called a school teacher or, in some contexts, an educator) is a person who helps others to acquire knowledge, competences or values." The target audience is a crucial part of the feedback loop. Removing the students from the equation sounds counter intuitive. What are the proposed alternative metrics? Who delivers the feedback? And what is the feedback based on, if not on the direct opinions of the…

I think the main idea here is that student evaluations only make sense if we assume that students are actually interested in acquiring knowledge, competences, or values, however if their main aim in a course is a good grade then their evaluations suddenly hold little value since they will rate "easy" instructors highest.

Isn’t it up to the universities to provide a majority their value in the form of education rather than in the form of a credential?

Not only do such institutions seemed to be concerned about cancerously growing credentialism, they’ve embraced it as a money money making scheme. See e.g. the explosion of terminal masters programs.

You reap what you sow.

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

#186

Post by vonmoltke »

bocklund wrote: post #90
Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few professors are granted tenure, as was the case in the past. It's weakly non-zero: times have changed. There are far more adjunct professors today. Universities are more run like businesses than in decades past.

I don’t have data, but I think most tenure track professors get tenure (if not at their current university, than another). Adjunct professors are not tenure track, so there is really no expectation that they would get tenure. Though I have seen the numbers that say the number of adjuncts is increasing.

The point is that far fewer professors are tenure track to begin with, compared to past decades.

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

#187

Post by weliketocode »

Let me a add a wrinkle to the mix specifically in terms of grade inflation.

The value of most coursework and any learnings gleaned from it, has dropped significantly.

The best value from entering education institutions is instead from job opportunities after. Unfortunately, these opportunities are often based on grades.

If the grades are more important than the coursework, then of course students will optimize for it.

Students should choose institutions & teachers based on both quality of opportunities and ease of coursework.

Going a step further, teachers that don't understand the changing interests of their students should be reprimanded.

At my university, most major recruiting for internships and such happened in one semester. Now, I specifically remember the dichotomy of two of my professors' approach to this.

Prof John - If you miss a class/deadline/exam due to recruiting, you get a 0.

Prof George - I understand recruiting is happening, reach out to me ASAP if you feel overwhelmed or need a date changed.

Now, the coursework has largely been forgotten. But, I will never forget John's idiocy.

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

#188

Post by dsqrt »

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.

I have studied in Europe (Italy and Germany) and now I am in the academia in the USA. Having student evaluate professors has been the standard practice for many years in Europe. I also do not think that American students have a worse attitude towards their professors than their EU counterpart. In my limited experience, I have actually found the opposite to be true: I found American students to be more actively involved in their education and less passive than Italian students (on average).

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

#189

Post by michaelmior »

skywhopper wrote: post #176

This strikes me as a very whiny article, not worthy of publishing in the Chronicle. A lifetime of hurt feelings and resentments bubbling up into a rant full of straw men and frankly irresponsible misinformation about the role student evaluations play in instructor assessment. It’s too bad, too, because there certainly are criticisms to be made, and this article hints at some of them. But a well designed evaluation in…

While I think it's true that the article overemphasized the weight placed on student evaluations somewhat, I think this does get to the real problem. There's nothing wrong with students evaluating instructors. The problem comes when this is the only method used to evaluate teaching effectiveness. I'm a newly appointed professor, but I've heard many stories from colleagues in the past about students thanking them for being demanding in their course as what they learned was helpful in the future. Demanding classes tend to have negative impact on student evaluations, but that's obviously not capturing the whole picture.

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

#190

Post by wahern »

skywhopper wrote: post #176

This strikes me as a very whiny article, not worthy of publishing in the Chronicle. A lifetime of hurt feelings and resentments bubbling up into a rant full of straw men and frankly irresponsible misinformation about the role student evaluations play in instructor assessment. It’s too bad, too, because there certainly are criticisms to be made, and this article hints at some of them. But a well designed evaluation in…

How does a sense of entitlement result in grade inflation? Well, the obvious way is if you pervasively require students evaluations, students systematically evaluate professors based on the grades they received, and these evaluations are used to make staffing and compensation decisions by the administration, incentivizing strategic grading behavior by professors.

Solution: stop the evaluations. Even most entitled students won't make unsolicited complaints. And of the ones who do? As long as student complaints aren't used to rank every professor relative to each other, but rather only to weed out the most egregious instructors, there's significantly less pressure for grade inflation. It's when you provide the administration a regular, systematized, "objective" stream of data points that the temptation to assess professors this way becomes irresistible for the administration.

Post reply on HN