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Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean

yalecollege.yale.edu

21–30 of 86 posts

Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean

#21
Whenever these cases come up, we tend to look at it with a status-quo bias - assuming that of course this data exists, and it's a question of whether it should be "free" (whatever your interpretation of that term). But in reality, things like YBB+ can impact the existence of the data in the first place - in this particular case, the evaluations existing in as comprehensive a form as they do depends on Yale's explicit sponsorship (having professors hand out the eval forms, etc.)

I'm not sure what the policy implication is - there's no easy rule here. But it's worthwhile to keep in mind that "information wants to be free, Yale can't decide how it's used" (an attitude that's a bit of a straw-man, but not too far from what some have argued here) ignores the reality that the next time the Yale faculty debate whether or not to collect and collate evaluations (or whether to have a numeric score component), they may well decide not to. (Which, of course, is a principle that applies to other cases of data collection - sometimes it's best not to collect it, just because you don't know how it'll be [mis-]used...)

Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean

#22
post #21

Whenever these cases come up, we tend to look at it with a status-quo bias - assuming that of course this data exists, and it's a question of whether it should be "free" (whatever your interpretation of that term). But in reality, things like YBB+ can impact the existence of the data in the first place - in this particular case, the evaluations existing in as comprehensive a form as they do depends on Yale's explicit…

You sort of have a point; the letter explicitly calls out that they're reconsidering providing this data at all.

But... given an adversary's policy of "we will provide this data if and only if it goes unused", there's no reason to give that policy any weight in deciding whether to use the data. If you decide to use it, the policy will kick in and you can't. If you decide not to use it, it's not relevant that it remains technically "available" for other people to also not use. That's not a reason to consider what Yale wants, it's a reason to slam them for being weasels.

Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean

#24
entrenched bureaucratic culture and a wide gap between the students and the faculty.

a post facto weak-sauce apology is about what I expected here. I get the distinct impression that what the Dean regrets most is that the story was widely publicized, rather than that her initial reaction was "heavy handed".

Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean

#25
post #3

As much as I would love to sit here carrying on about how Information Wants to be Free, I do appreciate where she's coming from. YBB forced to students to actually read course evals and apply critical thinking to their class selection. YBB+ wrongly suggests that the quality of a class can be reduced to a scalar value. We've complained about this bitterly going the other way. How many app developers are frustrated whe…

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.

Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean

#28

This is a pretty big setback for Yale in terms of refocusing more on STEM. But they're in good company. I'm sure 10-15 years ago music company executives were similarly pissed off.

I am pretty sure this isn't going to set Yale back in the slightest.

Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean

#30
post #3

As much as I would love to sit here carrying on about how Information Wants to be Free, I do appreciate where she's coming from. YBB forced to students to actually read course evals and apply critical thinking to their class selection. YBB+ wrongly suggests that the quality of a class can be reduced to a scalar value. We've complained about this bitterly going the other way. How many app developers are frustrated whe…

Actually, my experience in college was that classes could usually be reduced to a scalar value.

Regardless of subject matter, I learned the most in classes that had good teachers who received good evals.

However, the administration doesn't think that way; they think that it's more valuable to take the "right" course than to take a course with the right teacher.

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