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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

#221

Post by keithpeter »

nicoburns wrote: post #170
keithpeter wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK: when I was involved with teacher training at a local university, I had to act as placement tutor for around 15 training teachers - all graduates with good UK first degrees in a range of subjects. I had to observe each of the training teachers half a dozen times, and that process included checking the planning of their lessons (before the lesson!), providing feedback on the lesson itself and identifying issues to…

A big issue with education in the UK is that university lecturers generally get zero teacher training. Consequently, teaching quality at undergraduate level is widely variable.

Teacher training is subject to OFSTED every two years (or was) and so things are pretty tight. Teaching standards in general undergraduate courses are being slowly pulled up - but I know what you mean.

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

#222

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

analog31 wrote: post #211
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Likewise, an open secret is that college work is a simulation of the workplace. I don't think this is the case, and hasn't been for a long time. Assuming you're not looking at graduate classes college is largely a game of keeping your head down and doing the work you need to when you need to and the minimizing effort other than that. Cramming is totally a viable option as the metrics for success in college are tota…

In my view treating college as largely a game or whose metric is sheer survival, is wasting money, or more likely, paying to support the students who are getting something else out of it. This is not necessarily a personal judgment, because there may be people who are predisposed to see everything as a game, but who deserve to get the best education possible anyway. Here's my stupid parable. Give two people shovels a…

> But college is really about deciding what you want to get out of it.

If college is really a simulation of work, does that apply?

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

#223

Post by foobiekr »

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…

I have kept in touch with many of my professors over 20 Y. On a whim I checked out their online reviews not too long ago and mostly agreed.

In particular, a very close friend of mine is a tenured lecturer. He is a really good guy, but good lord is he a terrible instructor. The student reviews for him agree.

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

#224

Post by Y7ZCQtNo39 »

cortesoft wrote: post #43
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…

> Regarding professors wanting to keep review data tightly sealed: in my view, if you can't by public disclosure of your evaluation, then you either don't feel you're meeting expectations, or have no desire to improve in areas where students feel improvement could be made. There is also the third option, which the author is arguing for: that the professors do not think the ratings are an accurate reflection of their…

I don't understand how that's a third option because either the review data is open and publicly available, or it isn't.

That 'third option' is just an opinion about the data.

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

#225

Post by Y7ZCQtNo39 »

shanghaiaway wrote: post #85
Bjartr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like all end user feedback, what they claim they need isn't always going to be what they actually need, but the pain points they reveal can inform where improvement is necessary and valuable.

Sure, but that feedback which is directed at someone who is also a private person does not need to be made public.

Yeah, that's another angle I didn't touch on. You don't have to publish all the feedback data. You can choose just to goes with the quantitative results.

Comments are tricky since they're both qualitative and might need to be scrubbed for anything personally-identifying.

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

#226

Post by Fomite »

wahern wrote: post #192
Fomite wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grading on a curve statistically should mean that a fixed number of my students must fail my course. ...I don't really accept that.

Yes, accept that fixed number could be 0. Often a curve might be A-D, not A-F. And there are many shapes of curves. You choose the shape based on what you're trying to achieve. In this day and age a curve that requires as many Ds as As might not be tenable, but that doesn't mean you can't enforce some statistical distribution to help manage curriculum quality. The problem with grade inflation isn't just that it becom…

Enforcing a distribution assumes that student abilities are indeed stable.

In my experience, they aren't, for a number of reasons.

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

#227

Post by closeparen »

wahern wrote: post #181
closeparen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I'm aware that this philosophy of education and grading exists, and it may well be superior, but it's not how things worked in any part of my education. Grades indicated how well you met the instructor's expectations. Most classes gave mostly As and Bs: if you weren't going to do well relative to the course, you wouldn't let it get to the point of a letter grade.

Instead the differentiation was between departments and courses. It was well understood that X majors were Y majors who couldn't hack it, and that within a major, certain classes were for high-achieving masochists while others were schedule padding. (This was crucial information, not just dick-measuring. You could easily put yourself in crisis by taking a class beyond your abilities, or multiple hard classes at once. Friends helped each other avoid such nightmares). If you asked me to evaluate a classmate's transcript, I wouldn't even look at their grades, only at the classes they allowed themselves to have grades in.

No one has ever asked me that, or to see my transcript.

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

#228

Post by tk75x »

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.

I went to a college where all three professors who taught Chem 101 would collaborate on writing one exam that students from all three classes would then take at the same time in an auditorium setting. This kept the testing fair over the entire course and forced the professors to teach material based on agreed upon in advance topics to certain standards.

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

#229

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

syrrim wrote: post #215
wahern wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stu…

The average mark is generally fixed at around 75%. So a professor that systematically inflates grades will be called out.

> The average mark is generally fixed at around 75%

You just made that up.

> So a professor that systematically inflates grades will be called out.

Yyyyyyyeaaaahh...where?

From experience, the average mark given to Harvard humanities undergraduates is an A regardless of quality. Students literally cry in the middle of class if they get an A- because they can't string together a coherent argument from evidence.

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

#230

Post by syrrim »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #229
syrrim wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average mark is generally fixed at around 75%. So a professor that systematically inflates grades will be called out.

> The average mark is generally fixed at around 75% You just made that up. > So a professor that systematically inflates grades will be called out. Yyyyyyyeaaaahh...where? From experience, the average mark given to Harvard humanities undergraduates is an A regardless of quality. Students literally cry in the middle of class if they get an A- because they can't string together a coherent argument from evidence.

My uncle is a professor. This is what he said is required of him. Perhaps universities like harvard have lower standards.

In any case, consider that this system is in fact a solution to the proposed problem.

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