what a dumb bitch
Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
41–50 of 86 posts
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#42Han Solo: I must have hit her pretty close to the mark to get her all riled up like that, huh, kid?
Yale is going to end up on the wrong side of history in this one. And the irony is that the dean is a professor of history.
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone acts as rational machines, professors' egos have to be stroked too. They'd like to think that they can't just be reduced to a number between 1 and 5. Besides which, I think exposing rating systems for courses creates perverse incentives. It's been well studied that students who get better grades rate courses higher. Is that really what we want to be measuring professors against?
Yale students write Yale course reviews in order to see their grade. You get an email saying "a new grade has been posted," then you fill out the review form, then you see your grade.
Don't you think students already have a pretty good idea of what their grade will be before they write the review?
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#44It's almost certain that Yale will no longer make any course/instructor review information available online as a result of all this. The Dean as much as telegraphed this in his missive.
her.
Mary Miller, Dean of Yale College. http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/officedetail/454
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#45It's almost certain that Yale will no longer make any course/instructor review information available online as a result of all this. The Dean as much as telegraphed this in his missive.
her missive, actually
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#46If the dean is suggesting that there are limits on the value of single-measure evaluation, I look forward to hearing about what she has in mind for student evaluations. I hope and expect that she will devote the same amount of energy to our long-outdated grading system as she devotes to hiding information about professor evaluations.
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#47> Yale dean […] apologizes Perhaps I'm missing something, but I do not see an apology behind that link. A detail of Yale's reasoning, but not an apology. > However, I disagree that Yale violated its policies on free expression in this situation. I'm not sure what "[Yale's] policies on free expression" are, but my understanding here is that Yale blocked the IP address of a site because it was using some data that Yale…
I wonder if they act the same way about contentious academic papers. Prof A writes a paper, Prof B writes a rebuttal quoting Prof A's paper, Prof A cries copyright and shuts down Prof B?
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an app developer who has gotten those reviews, the reality is they don't actually matter . Since everyone gets them, the real question is how many happy and 5 star reviews you get from the rest of your customers. You don't have 3 stars because of the guy that put 1 star, you have 3 stars because of the people who gave it 3, or all the people who didn't feel it was worth it to put down 5 stars. The situation is the…
I feel like rating systems should be median based. Or bottom 25th percentile based. Those asshats that put 1 star "because it doesn't do x, otherwise 5" ruin 4 other 5 star ratings. When the bottom 25th percentile would still be 5/5.
I fully agree with you. For example when I look at Amazon reviews I never look at 5 star or 1 star review. Always 2,3,4 - those come from people that actually had issues - some smaller some larger. Then I can decide: ok, I might encounter these problems but it's something I can live with.
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#49> In doing so, the developers violated Yale’s appropriate use policy by taking and modifying data without permission, but, more importantly, they encouraged students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information. To claim that Yale’s effort to ensure that students received complete information somehow violated freedom of expression turns that principle on its head. I think she doesn't really know what free…
Not everyone acts as rational machines, professors' egos have to be stroked too. They'd like to think that they can't just be reduced to a number between 1 and 5. Besides which, I think exposing rating systems for courses creates perverse incentives. It's been well studied that students who get better grades rate courses higher. Is that really what we want to be measuring professors against?
> Not everyone acts as rational machines
OK, but now you're arguing that Yale students shouldn't be exposed to free expression because they're incapable of handling its consequences. I think that's silly, but fine: it's a real argument. But let's stop pretending this kind of paternalism is consistent with even a modest notion of free expression, because it's very clearly not. It says "you can only say things we approve of, because we know best." Being right about knowing best doesn't make it not a limitation on free expression. Free expression as a principle necessarily doesn't hinge on whether you think the individual expressions are right. That's, like, the whole point of it. [1]
You're also arguing that 1-5 rating systems are silly and Yale shouldn't bother collecting them, but that has nothing to do with the YBB+ website or how students will interpret it. For example, wouldn't those perverse incentives you mention be in place already, given that providing feedback to professors was the whole point? Ratings don't magically transform from useful evaluation tools to misguided oversimplifications just because students have convenient access to them. Either they carry useful information or they don't.
[1] I'm not taking a free expression absolutist position here. (I'm tempted to, but it's totally unnecessary for this discussion.) The point is that to the degree to which you make rules about what kind of thing people can express is, well, trivially the degree to which you limit free expression. And limiting the ability of students to transmit truthful data about the courses they're taking is a very strong limitation, and it would be hard to formulate a consistent, principled policy that permits this kind of restriction and doesn't just say, "you can't say things we don't like".
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#50> In doing so, the developers violated Yale’s appropriate use policy by taking and modifying data without permission, but, more importantly, they encouraged students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information. To claim that Yale’s effort to ensure that students received complete information somehow violated freedom of expression turns that principle on its head. I think she doesn't really know what free…
That would be the definition of "freedom of speech" in many western countries. (or at-least i believe it is similar in similar countries other than my own, i have not fact checked that.)
For example in Sweden we have laws that provide "freedom of speech".
It means that one can ALMOST say what one wants to anyone. One may however not say/or behave in a way that is intended to offend a group of people. Saying such a thing leads either to Jail or a Fine.