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What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

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Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#31

Post by sklogic »

yodsanklai wrote: post #27
ColinWright wrote: post #2

Here's the take-away quotation for me: The better the professors were, as measured by their students' grades in later classes, the lower their ratings from students. "If you make your students do well in their academic career, you get worse evaluations from your students," Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don't enjoy learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some good.

I'm not sure it is that simple. I believe most university students can tell the difference between a good and a bad professor and are honest enough to fill up evaluation forms in good faith. They are able to assess the involvement of their professors, the quality of the projects and the course material. On the other hand, they aren't qualified to discuss the relevance of the topic for instance. I think this type of e…

Most university students are too young to be able to tell the difference. And they're spoiled by all that "consumer rights" crap. Education is a peculiar thing, the more it hurts, the better the results. But people do not like when it hurts, especially the young and unexperienced ones.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#32

Post by bobochan »

I have had a chance to look at course evaluation data over time and the scary thing about it is how quickly ratings can change from year to year. One year a professor might be considered an absolute rock star with students raving about the course, but a problematic upgrade to a piece of software used in the course can drive students absolutely mad the next year. I'm convinced that there is a group think that occurs very quickly in the term and profs are immediately labeled as either stars or bozos, and it is hard to change that perception once it has formed.

Another huge factor in course evaluations is the economic environment and prospects for upcoming graduates. Tight labor markets seem to correlate with higher course evaluations as students value subjects that will hopefully make them more marketable. Conversely, a lot of courses get hammered when the job market is good because students start getting a "just give me the piece of paper so I can get out there" feeling.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#33

Post by pliny »

bvrlt wrote: post #8
Siecje wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that applies at the college/university level. Evaluations are at the end of the course and you will know if you have learned a lot. The problem is profs just reading the textbook or parts of the textbook in a powerpoint, without challenging students.

Even at the college/university level I have seen students complaining about professors that were fairly good, sometimes just because the grading was a bit tough.

emodendroket: 'Too tough', as I've heard it, almost always means 'failing average' or 'failing median', but we can only trade anecdotes around that.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#34

Post by _delirium »

yodsanklai wrote: post #27
ColinWright wrote: post #2

Here's the take-away quotation for me: The better the professors were, as measured by their students' grades in later classes, the lower their ratings from students. "If you make your students do well in their academic career, you get worse evaluations from your students," Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don't enjoy learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some good.

I'm not sure it is that simple. I believe most university students can tell the difference between a good and a bad professor and are honest enough to fill up evaluation forms in good faith. They are able to assess the involvement of their professors, the quality of the projects and the course material. On the other hand, they aren't qualified to discuss the relevance of the topic for instance. I think this type of e…

I would be more willing to believe that with some time passing. In my own case, how I judged my professors with 3-5 years of hindsight is different from how I judged them right at the end of the course, when I filled out the evaluations.

The biggest factor in my own case is that in retrospect I have more respect for the difficult courses, and less respect for the easy courses, then I did at the time they actually took place. I think this is mostly because at the time I judged courses by whether they felt fair/unfair, and the easiest way for a professor to avoid students feeling they were judged unfairly is to just judge everyone in a broadly positive way. If you give some people Cs, inevitably some of them will feel they deserved higher (and sometimes they will even be right, since there is an error rate). While if you give everyone an A/B there's less cause for complaint, because many fewer students perceive getting a grade higher than they deserve as unfair.

A secondary factor is that when judging in retrospect I put a little less weight on personality and style than I did at the time. Professors with a "entertaining/engaging" style generally seemed good to me at the time, but in retrospect some of them were a bit shallow in the actual material (some were good, though). As an adult occasionally looking for online lectures, I now tend to specifically avoid the more "TED-style" lecturers, even though they are initially appealing, and find I get more out of a more straightforward, sober style.

Some of the really easy and "fun" courses in particular feel like a missed opportunity to me: we had a good time every week in class, I got an A, and I rated the course positively, but I've had to go back and self-study from a book because I had not actually learned much the first time around. If you asked me for the rating 5 years later, I would've revised it downwards!

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#35

Post by heapcity »

I'm an abrasive type teacher who gets polarized response distributions. Once when I substituted for the most highly rated professor at a local cc in my subject, I received a most memorable compliment: 'Finally, a real teacher.' ... I quit teaching after one too many interventions from administration and parents about crying kids who could not possibly make less than an A.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#36

Post by jmilloy »

My undergraduate courses had professor evaluations. Using these evaluations unilaterally to fire professors is ridiculous, considering the varying incentives students have, the various reasons that professors end up teaching the courses they do, the various values that individual professors bring to university other than teaching, the various ways professors can improve given the right resources and support, etc.

But there are poor professors who are evaluated poorly by students yet teach year after year with no improvement. So the problem is that the evaluations are not being used properly -- by professors and administrators -- to make the necessary adjustments. Shouldn't we be firing the administrators?

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#37

Post by rpcope1 »

emodendroket wrote: post #25
tr352 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well those might be legitimate complaints. Professor is fine but his grading is too tough.

"Too tough" means "I didn't get the grade I wanted." Grade inflation is a real problem.

Agreed. When I was teaching before I started out as a developer, it was unheard of to fail anyone in an entry level Physics class (granted this was an Ivy League school); over many semesters I recall thinking that we had passed several students that had no business advancing "because medschool needs high GPAs" or because we didn't want to ruin some kid's future in engineering (when they may not have been successful anyways). But yeah many (most?) of the kids care about a high grade before learning anything, and expect nothing less than an A, even if they don't deserve it.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#39

Post by FollowSteph3 »

ColinWright wrote: post #2

Here's the take-away quotation for me: The better the professors were, as measured by their students' grades in later classes, the lower their ratings from students. "If you make your students do well in their academic career, you get worse evaluations from your students," Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don't enjoy learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some good.

That's the crux, the worst and best teachers will be evaluated almost the same. You need some kind of additional flag to identify this, and unfortunately the next class isn't always possible. Another idea would be a follow up survey 5+ years after the student fraudsters. This is possible as most professors teach for longer than 5+ years.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#40

Post by strathmeyer »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #6
ColinWright wrote: post #2

Here's the take-away quotation for me: The better the professors were, as measured by their students' grades in later classes, the lower their ratings from students. "If you make your students do well in their academic career, you get worse evaluations from your students," Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don't enjoy learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some good.

The methodology is flawed. If a lecturer really is terrible, then more people will fail that course and not go on to do the advanced course, artificially raising the average for the advanced course because only the best students are able to pass the prerequisite DESPITE the terrible lecturer.

Yeah, or even... good students are better at identifying bad professors. Some of my professors were leaders in their field but couldn't teach a class worth anything. I can see why the smart students would get good grades in those classes. Why wouldn't the rest of us be able to tell that they were a bad professor??
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