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What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

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Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#81

Post by ohfunkyeah »

jestinjoy1 wrote: post #65

Students rating professors is bad because 1. Professors raise bar sometimes which students find difficult to cope with and result in low feedback 2. Some students try to "hit" professors with low grades since they are not interested in them 3. More work by professors means low grades from students This is what usually happens in India and I am a professor

I disagree completely. You are confusing students rating professors with the how good the survey is and how the university may or may not react to the results. In an of itself rating professors is not good or bad.

1. Part of raising the bar should be making sure students understand that you are doing it and are into it. Also by saying "raising the bar" you are implying that they are going above what the rest of the university is doing. Which is an indictment of the university not of the students. 2. Why aren't they interested in them? Could it be because they are not good? 3. So professors should be able to assign any amount of work that they deem fit? If its a 2-credit course with the workload of a 4-credit course then the professor is bad. If its a 4-credit class and other 4-credit classes have significantly less work, then the university is screwing up. If the its a 4-credit course with a lot more work than other 4-credit courses then that should probably be clearly conveyed up front or have some mechanism for conveying that.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#82

Post by ColinWright »

Lafcadio wrote: post #78
nights192 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ).

It's no longer a common mistake, it's now become an idiom in some dialectic variations. As such it cannot be broken down into its constituent parts and analyzed for meaning, it has to be understood as an atomic utterance. It's a little like "The proof is in the pudding." The original was "The proof (test) of the pudding is in the eating," but it got shortened, possibly by mistake, possibly by laziness. And so it is with "I could(n't) care less."

It's like sandpaper on my brain, but that's how linguistics works. The more you study language, the more you realize it can't possibly work.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#83

Post by sbpayne »

Yeah, this is certainly ridiculous. Student ratings often correlate more with grades than they do actual effectiveness of professors.

The professors who inflate grades (and thus are really the ones that are diminishing educational value) are the ones who would keep their jobs.

I like the place this is coming from (there's zero accountability from students to professors). But such an extreme measure is something I feel would work against the end goal.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#84

Post by fragmede »

nilkn wrote: post #73
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 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…

> The best professor in my school's math department was also the most beloved

Out of curiosity, what class traditionally 'belonged' to that teacher?

Freshman classes for non-majors (think pre-algebra for art majors) taught in a harsh-but-fair manner is going to score differently than an upper-class or graduate level on manifolds.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#85

Post by evanpw »

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.

A lot of students are there to get a degree, not to learn something. Employers don't know or care how much freshman chemistry you remember (unless you're a chemist), but they do care if you didn't finish your degree because you couldn't pass some requirement.

I wonder if the the same relationship is true in fields where there is a licensing exam at the end of your degree (like engineering). Or maybe something like a high-school AP class, where the final exam isn't written by the person teaching. In that case, the teacher would be more obviously on "the same side" as the student.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#86

Post by pistle »

What if a small, semi-random sample of voters could fire an elected official for any piece of legislation they attach their name to?

I see the grades in Iowa elevating and the market-value of a degree from Iowa discounting. You get an A! You get an A! You get an A! You ALL GET AN "A"!!!!

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#87

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

j2kun wrote: post #80

The 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?

Wages will increase and the highest quality professors will flock to Iowa to become millionaires. Kinda like how it is in Korea.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#88

Post by ohfunkyeah »

dagw wrote: post #11
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.

Based on my experience at University great teachers who push and challenge students are generally disliked by the large group of students that don't particularly want to be pushed or challenged.

But why wouldn't they want to be pushed and challenged? The only thing universities offer is the chance to learn more and be pushed or challenged. AFAIK they could not possibly be there for any other reason than to learn deeply.

I think it would be interesting to know if professors who push and challenge within a non-dgree open online course would face the similar wrath? I'd bet not.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#90

Post by cafard »

'Ted Hilles, the chairman, was a remarkably kind man who was embarrassed by having to do so, but he read the student comments aloud to each of us. "This is the kind of teacher that I came to Yale to study with,", the student you had given a B+ or an A would say. Then there would follow the report of students like Smithers, to whom you cad given a C or a D: "This man is the worst teacher I have ever studied with, he is a disgrace to the Yale faculty and far infirior [sic] to my masters at Andover. A profound cynicism about student comments was born from the experience of hearing these absolutely opposite evaluations one after another and knowing how closely they correlated with the grades you had given."

--Alvin Kernan, In Plato's Cave

I don't recall there being student evaluations of teachers in my undergraduate days (which were not spent at Yale or anything like it). When I went back to school part time in my 30s, I wrote bad things about only a couple of instructors, both for showing up unprepared (and occasionally not showing up at all).

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