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What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?
71–80 of 190 posts
Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've had terrible professors who were ridiculously easy, though. Like one guy I didn't learn a thing from, because he constantly mumbled and wrote in really tiny print on the whiteboard... yet the class before each test, he'd discuss every single test question in detail and tell us the answers. A friend of mine had him for something else, and at one point after delivering a graded test, he said "if you didn't like yo…
This is called bribing the students. Many terrible professors do it and it works extremely well.
Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?
#73Here'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 don't doubt that this is true in general and is sufficient to destroy any attempt to have students control professor selection, but I'm hesitant to take too much away from this. The best professor in my school's math department was also the most beloved; he was routinely showered with praise by students, and his students were also very successful in later classes. And his classes were not at all easy.
I guess we can rank teachers in three tiers:
(1) The lowest tier, consisting of teachers both loved and despised who either way fail to prepare students for future classes.
(2) Abhorred teachers who do succeed in preparing students for future coursework.
(3) The highest tier, consisting of beloved teachers who do succeed in preparing students for future coursework.
It's very hard to get into the third tier, because it requires remarkable finesse to make students feel good about having to work extremely hard and possibly still not getting a good grade.
Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?
#74Here'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 don't doubt that this is true in general and is sufficient to destroy any attempt to have students control professor selection, but I'm hesitant to take too much away from this. The best professor in my school's math department was also the most beloved; he was routinely showered with praise by students, and his students were also very successful in later classes. And his classes were not at all easy. I guess we ca…
I suspect (3) is pretty much impossible, and being — say — 2.5 involves being a gifted entertainer and either having tenure or dumbing down your grading to avoid ticking off students just for giving out fair grades.
Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?
#75Let me give you the other perspective, the one where we ask if the professor is payed by the University to teach. From my understanding they are chosen for their research, their interest lies in research and so the incentives are aligned towards that.
That way teaching for a large amount of academic professors is just a side-job, and comes secondary in the pecking order to researching itself. I'm specifically targeting Management/Business courses in the UK.
Now you see why student evaluations are used. We can suffer the consequences of this disconnect between incentives and foci of an academic, and that becomes problematic.
Most academics need to be kept in check, and connected to the realities of how the students experience their course, in terms of "support available"; "clarity" etc.
Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?
#76Here'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.
Here's a different study with similar findings: http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf "... our results show that student evaluations reward professors who increase achievement in the contemporaneous course being taught, not those who increase deep learning."
It's easy to take this and the quote above and leap to the assessment that students like professors that give good grades. But why is this? I think it comes from a fundamental disconnect between what a lot of students really want and what universities are complicit in pretending to offer. A lot of students want the degree so they can get a job in field XYZ. Universities are more than happy to take that desire to get a job and conflate it with a desire to get a higher-level education. They are the gate-keepers to getting a job in many different fields but in many ways act as if they have almost zero responsibility for that responsibility.
Just imagine if universities decided to no longer offer degrees and only offered the opportunity for deep understanding and learning. Get rid of grades too, just offer P/F for readiness for the next level of teaching. Do you think student evaluations would still have this bias?
Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?
#77Determining professor tenure via student rating is obviously an extreme idea and likely to fail as outlined by many of the other comments in this thread. But, framing students as customers, is a worthwhile debate to have in the US given the high cost of tuition. Considering the crushing debt student loans can create, students should think of going to college as an investment with risk and return. I wish it were not this way. Let's not pretend that most US universities aren't operating like sophisticated businesses concerned with marketing, generating revenue, and besting competitors. That makes students (along with some other groups) customers. And perhaps if these customers are unhappy, maybe we should blame management (administrators) instead of professors.
Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't care less* <3
I believe the term 'could care less' is largely facetious- "I could care less... but it would be extremely difficult," tends to be the implication; don't understand why you found it necessary to correct him. edit: Added clarification.
Eh, I think it's just a common mistake, and I corrected them because it's a pet peeve of mine, not because I think it is a big deal. Your line of thinking is not new to me though, and if "could care less" is sarcastic then I would argue it is particularly ineffective sarcasm (see: http://incompetech.com/gallimaufry/care_less.html).
Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?
#79This would not work, often students perceive strict professors has being bad because they give too much work load or are too strict. It also goes against excellent researchers who are contributing a lot to science but are not great teachers. Often these are "forced" to teach by their university because otherwise they don't get grants. I am not in academia, but in retrospective some of my greatest professors where ver…
Researchers who are forced to teach, and are bad teachers because of this, SHOULD be fired from teaching. If the university doesn't value their research alone enough to justify their employment they probably should also be fired altogether.
Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?
#80The market would fix this should the bill become a law. All professors and applicants who care about their jobs will just leave Iowa or never go there in the first place. I wonder who will suffer then?