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What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

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Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#111

Post by JoeAltmaier »

chasing wrote: post #109

Students and professors are not peers. A professor has to be able to force a student to do something they don't want to. "You don't understand this." "You're not doing this right." "You're not working hard enough to learn what you need to learn in the limited amount of time we have, here." Etc. A student might find this unpleasant, embarrassing, or whatever. But that doesn't mean the professor is wrong. Or bad at the…

Why 'unfair'? Because they're being rated by a person that knows them from only a few hours exposure a week, in a stilted environment and based on a narrow context of arcane skills?

Sounds like a student's life. Cry me a river, professor.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#112

Post by maw »

debacle wrote: post #46
fmsf wrote: post #16

This 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…

I've never had a bad STEM professor who was proficient in English. I don't know if I've just been lucky or if this is a common misconception about the role of a teacher versus a professor.

I think you were lucky. I definitely had some miserable professors and TAs who were native English speakers. And some professors and TAs with comically bad English but who were good at what they did anyway.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#113

Post by retali8 »

It's really frustrating when I paid $50k/yr at a top 5 univ for CS deg, and some of the CS courses (including a junior year core) were taught by PhD students with incomprehensible English accents. I have no issue with non-english speakers getting their PhDs...they're obviously very intelligent and I respect them greatly...however, they are not suited at all for instruction by lecture... in those courses i learned nothing during class, and learned everything myself later on.

i once had a PhD student as lecturer in an advanced track course -- we bumped into him at a bar one saturday...this guy was jumping all over the tables, drunk and wasted out of his damn mind...

now i did have some amazing profs but those were all tenured.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#115

Post by kazinator »

ohfunkyeah wrote: post #100
kazinator wrote: post #91

Degrees granted from any university that regards students as customers are automatically worthless junk, because they are essentially purchased goods. When a professor is rated low, at least some of that rating has to do with the professor having a high standard in the awarding of grades and passing of students. If students get good grades then no matter how much the lectures suck, or how unavailable that professor i…

Degrees and grades are a big part of the problem because they are treated as currency to get a job. Degrees are like the Microsoft points system. I want a job in field XYZ. Well to get that you have to buy 256 credits. But, but, it looks like the job really only requires 120 credits. Too bad you have to buy 256. Ok, fine... WTF, part of the 120 credits have absolutely no relevance to the thing I want to do. Yeah, wel…

All university credits are relevant to that job, even those humanities courses and whatever. Credits directly relevant to the job skills are more like vocational training; whereas university is supposed to be about education.

Also, one reason some jobs prefer applicants with degrees is because university completion shows that you have some ambition and willingness to work hard toward a goal that is several years away, in the face of deadlines and stress, and possibly financial risk also. They know you've pulled a few all-nighters to get through.

In other words, you're gone through a pretty tough four year (or more) project: to produce a degreed version of yourself.

That degree shows that you can work, even if you don't have employment experience.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#116

Post by cgearhart »

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.

>> Society should not punish people who kill people like Locascio.

Direct quote from a student eval [1] of the hardest professor I've ever had. There are more like it. The professor blew it up and posted it on his bulletin board. It would irreparably damage higher learning to put the livelihood of teachers like this in the hands of kids who can't even legally drink yet.

And -- in keeping with the premise of the article -- I went on to spend the next two years on the Dean's List, in no small part because I had learned so much in Locascio's classes.

[1] http://polyratings.com/eval.phtml?profid=382

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#117

Post by Crito »

amyjess wrote: post #61
Sir_Substance wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

I had a terrible professor that was actually reasonably competent at teaching (the material wasn't hard in the first place, but still), but was terrible because of how she behaved in class. The best way to describe it is abusive.

As just one example: She'd do this thing after every exam where she would call off each name one at a time, have them walk to the front of the class to get back their graded test, where she would then berate them for anything they got wrong on the exam. It didn't matter if you got a A, if there was single thing wrong on the exam she would berate you over it. Really vicious personal attacks. It was so extreme that for a class of 20-30 students, it took the full hour to hand back tests. Averaging 2-3 minutes per student, yelling at them in front of the entire class.

Needless to say she always got awful reviews from her students, but if that effected her career, it was not apparent.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#119

Post by xijuan »

I just wanted to say few things about my experiences on reading students' ratings on ratemyprofressor.com.

First, professors who consistently get good ratings are usually very good lecturers. They are not necessarily easy profs. But they do give great lectures and explain things more thoroughly. On the other hand, professors who get consistently low ratings are usually not good. For example, last term, I took a course with a prof who got 2/5 on ratemyprofessor and her lectures indeed suck although she is a kind person. She doesn't explain the math materials she is teaching; just barely writes down notes on the board. And all the students I have talked to also think she is not a good teacher. The term before I took a course a prof who got 4/5 on ratemyprofessor. She is indeed a great prof and explained everything so clearly. Our class wrote the same exams as the sections but our average was 7 percentage higher overall.

Of course, the ratings from that website may not be equivalent to the ratings profs get from their actual teaching evaluation. But from my experience, I think the students do have the ability to distinguish between good profs and bad profs. And students' ratings are not only based on how easy the course is but also based on how interesting the lectures are and how approachable the prof is.

Does anyone who has an opposite experience from what I have experienced? That is taking a course who a prof who got high ratings on ratemyprofs but felt the prof was bad.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#120

Post by Crito »

fragmede wrote: post #84
nilkn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my case, there were two professors that were widely loved and often cited as the best professors.

One was an english professor who had control over the courses about science fiction and fantasy, and often taught a Tolkien course. No real mystery why he was so popular (although he was also a really great personable guy).

The other was a math professor that taught the standard assortment of undergrad math classes. I had him for Calc I, Calc III, and Discrete. Most of the math professors in my university that were teaching those classes (particularly the calculus classes) were either hated or unknown. However he had a reputation for being a truly gifted lecturer, and for having incredibly accommodating office hours. His reputation was well earned and deserved.

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