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.
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.
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.
By the end of the course they'd only know they've got an exam to pass and they'll hate it. Students should not have any say in anything related to their courses, professors, marking, workload and such.
Back in my days in the university we (all the students) hated mostly the toughest professors. Now, many years later, the only stuff that I still remember well, to a degree that I can go and pass an exam, despite not using much of it in my work, is from the courses of those most hated professors.
And now students are much worse, they're expecting a "value for money", they want to be entertained. They do not like being pushed hard. Just look at all those disgusting stories:
>what kind of cretins can find such an exam "too complicated"?
There is absolutely no context in that article, and it shows a single question from the exam, yet you deduce that everyone that wrote and complained about it is a moron?
This is a two-way street: I've seen ridiculous student complaints, but I've also had terrible instructors. There are "cretins" on both sides of the table.
These are the questions the students specifically complained about. Taken from one of their tweets. And you don't need to know the domain in order to infer that those students are cretins indeed, if they find such questions tough.
> But HN is regularly bombarded with articles about college and university being a over-valued investment.
Would you go to a doctor who skipped a college? Do you want to drive over a bridge designed by a bunch of hipster dropouts? If not, then the higher education is still relevant, and all the hipsters must just shut up.
> But how can you chain that in the same sentence to a right to be entertained ?
I'm quoting one of the student complaints - that a lecturer is not "entertaining enough", and this is not "what they paid their money for".
EDIT: and yes, it's not the students who changed recently, it's the creeping commercialisation of the education system in general. Students are "consumers" now, and this is a new thing indeed. They should not be blamed for such an attitude, of course.
For a doctor, I don't think I care very much if they have completed bachelors or not (in the US they are more or less required to for acceptance to medical school, but I don't see what good this does me as a patient).
It doesn't do shit for you as a patient. A certainly not any more than trading that 4 yr lib arts degree for 4 more years of medical training. Universities as gatekeepers to actual jobs without is something that definitely needs to be addressed but you'll probably never see them bring this up. Imagine how bad for business it would be if all Universities offered was a chance to learn.
Simple question. Really convoluted answer. But the end payers are the students. And they want their money's worth.
Of course, the worth is derived from their uneducated selves, and "higher educated" peoples know what's best for them.
A percent of income for X years seems much fairer way of paying for education. But even that has its flaws. We have yet to see the full blowback from our current way of financing higher ed. My estimate is 20 years. And 2008 will be a walk in the park.
I agree. The system right now is fucked, and we are at least 20 years out before we see the full ramifications.
Instead, I imagine something different for a school. If someone fails a course, one has to retake it. This is silly if one is trying to learn. Instead, the answer is to stick with the area of problem until it is understood. But, because profit motives take hold, it is simply easier to fail someone.
The better answer for teaching is less material per class, shorter classes (vs 18 weeks), and quick to fail. And aside that should be no punishment to fail. In essence, aside laziness, it is both the teacher and the student who fail when a concept is not learned, but the onus lies purely on the student in our system.
I also believe that payment should be hinged upon future earnings, and not a ballooned sum payable in the hopes of a job. A percentage would be fair for X years... Of course I acknowledge that this could cause the liberal arts to falter. Marx and Engels divined this long ago with their analysis of capitalism and supremacy of what we call STEM degrees.
In the higher education it is not a lecturers job to convey the material to even the slowest of the class. The responsibility is entirely on the students side.
Education is selective and there is nothing wrong with it. Self-education is a very important part of it, and the only thing teacher really must consistently do is to help the students to identify their flaws as quickly as possible so they can go and address them.
But, yes, everyone must be able to retake any course any number of times, until either passed or pissed off.
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.
"The only thing universities offer is the chance to learn more and be pushed or challenged."
Um, have you been to a university? ;-)
When you think about it, the professors aren't (necessarily) there to teach either. They are there primarily for the opportunity to do research though that may be changing as many professors are part time minimum wage contractors.
Yeah, exactly my point. That statement is laughable to anyone who as been to a University. I'm not even sure if being pushed and/or challenged to become better educated is even a primary focus of Universities.
I see a common theme in this and your other comment[0]. In my experience, however, evaluations from students have next-to-nothing to do with how much the students have or have not learned, and that is the point of the linked study[1]. Quoting:
> Controlled, randomized experiments find that
> SET ratings are negatively associated with
> direct measures of effectiveness. SET seem
> to be influenced by the gender, ethnicity,
> and attractiveness of the instructor.
The other link[2] says:
> We find that teacher quality matters substantially
> and that our measure of effectiveness is negatively
> correlated with the students’ evaluations of professors.
Both these formal studies are at odds with what you seem to be saying.
I've only known a few profs who just read the text or parts of the text in powerpoint. Of the profs I was a TA for, only one used powerpoint and he made his own slides separate from the text.
It definitely applies. One of the best profs in my department often got poor evaluations in some of the first year courses she taught (which were required for everyone). But, she consistently gets excellent ratings for her 3rd year, 4th year, and grad courses (which were targeted for her specialty). She's known for being tough, but students can learn a lot in her courses and they actually do well. First years seem to think that they can get away with more because she's a short woman. She's had students try and suggest how to change her exams after midterms because they've taught swimming lessons. She once had a comment on RateMyProfessor.ca, "I'd say she worships Satan, but I think Satan worships her." It was eventually dropped after several years, but she wrote it in calligraphy and put it up in her office. We all thought that was very funny.
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??
True in theory, but not true in practice. Terrible lecturers find ways to rationalize the poor grades of their students (i.e. externalize the blame) and curve grades to get kids to pass the class. Especially bad lecturers will give the bulk of students high grades to preclude complaints. For their part, poor students could care less about what they learn, instead focusing on passing or getting a good letter grade. In poor programs, subsequent more advanced courses in a sequence are subjected to downward pressure when it comes to teaching more rigorous or advanced topics because the students suck so badly (because of the lack of rigor in early courses). A cluster of poor students can be surprisingly good at stymieing course progress. Many professors have to perform research and would rather placate the students with good grades instead of wasting their research time, which is vital to maintaining their careers (Teaching is secondary at research universities no matter what administration tells you) . The can gets kicked down the road, and mediocrity matriculates.
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.
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.
The more you study language, the more you realize that none of it makes sense. It's a wonder how any of us English speakers understand what each other are talking about. I think the trick is to only look deep enough to gauge the sentiment of the presenter and no further. If you look too deeply, the whole thing falls to pieces.
Generally I agree with this approach, but this case seems similar (though obviously not in the safety aspects) to "flammable" versus "inflammable". Obviously you can't really stop actual usage, but I know this used to always confuse me when I was younger, so I'm disinclined to criticize people who yell "Stop!".
The other thing that people often overlook, is that "could care less" and "couldn't care less" mean exactly the same thing IF the person saying "could care less" was intending to be sarcastic.
As in:
"I couldn't care less about this test." (literal)
"I could care less about this test." (sarcastic)
Yes, the actual expression is "couldn't care less" but I can easily see how people think it is "could care less" (in a sarcastic tone).
Same as "by the waist side" instead of "by the wayside." The term "wayside" is so rarely used now that people mishear it and rationalise the alternative definition that does make sense.
There are other examples too (correct on the right):
- Nip it in the butt vs. Nip it in the bud
- One in the same vs. One and the same
- You’ve got another thing coming vs. You’ve got another think coming
- Each one worse than the next vs. Each one worse than the last
- On accident vs. By accident
- For all intensive purposes vs. For all intents and purposes
> As such it cannot be broken down into its constituent parts and analyzed for meaning, it has to be understood as an atomic utterance.
I understand the implicit preface that is something like "If you want to communicate frictionlessly …", but I think that one actually doesn't have to do this. The arguments for accepting variants of spelling do not, I think, automatically apply to accepting (illogical) variants of phrases; while there is no intrinsically 'right' spelling of a word, there is a sense (given what the constituent words mean) in which "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" are objectively different, and the latter captures what is probably meant.
I mean to say that it is perfectly possible to insist on, and to try to enforce, a logical approach to the use of language. (Without this impulse, for example, we wouldn't have Lojban (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban)—which, OK, may not be a very practical loss, but I think we can agree would be an intellectual loss.) Granted this will not optimise for communication, or pleasant social interaction, but we all have the right to choose the fitness metric that we want to use!
If the lecturer is solely responsible for the final grade then there isn't necessarily any correlation between how bad the lecturer is and if you pass or fail.
One of the worst lecturers I had at university (thought the course he was teaching was way beneath him and basically didn't give a fuck) also gave such extremely easy tests that basically everybody passed almost despite themselves.
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 your grade, give your test back to me and I'll give you more points". My friend, who got a 95, decided to give it back out of sheer curiosity and got back a 98.
Edit: Hey, I have another story about this dude: another friend of mine had him for a class. This friend is legally blind, so he once asked for more time to take the test since it takes him longer to read everything. A perfectly reasonable request: it's even listed on the form of accomodations offered by the university's Disability Services. Well, when the professor filled out the form, he granted my friend literally every single disability accomodation the university offered. He ended up with dozens of accomodations he didn't even ask for
The right way to do it is "if you don't agree with your grade, give me your paper and I will look at it more carefully. Of course I'm not just going to look at the question you're contending, but all of them. Your grade may go up, but it also may go down. Do you wish to wager?"
A very good high school math teacher of mine did this.
I think he did not get very many takers; the students were never confident that they would not lose more undeserved marks in the other question to more than offset any gain.
What's so great about this strategy? When a teacher does this to me I assume he/she is more interested in doing his research instead of leading a class.
This was what we taught to say when I was a tutor for a university. The point was the student could not come and just point out that something was wrong with the marking and they deserve more points. If they thought the grade was not fair it could be remarked, but the whole thing would be remarked and a totally new grade assigned. You might come out better or worse for it.
I have actually mostly gotten this strategy from very dedicated teachers. It's meant to address a strategy clever and grade-seeking students work out very quickly: without something like this, constantly asking for regrades has zero cost, and occasionally benefit to you.
This moves regrade requests more toward "No, I checked over my exam again and I'm sure this is a mistake..." rather than "Maybe I'll pick up another point or two..."
Look, I'm a student. I'm supposed to make mistakes. It's natural for me to be wrong. I should be wrong many times now so that I can learn and not make those mistakes in the future.
But you're a teacher. You are supposed to correct mistakes. You are supposed not to make mistakes, or at the very least to be honest about those mistakes. You're not supposed to try to intimidate me so that I stop questioning you; you're supposed to encourage critical thinking and healthy scepticism.
In short: if a teacher hears that he made a mistake when grading it's his duty to check it again, carefully; and if it happens to be true he should be honest about it and admit it instead of threatening that he'll lower the grade even further. What your teacher said could be read as: "Ok, so I may have fucked up, but that doesn't matter, because I'm so much smarter than you and I can fuck you up in any way I'd like; do you want me to show you?" Your teacher probably didn't mean it that way, but I met a fair share of teachers who did; it would be best to stay away from such ambiguous phrasings altogether.
The problem with being too open to regarded is that the teacher is inundated with frivolous requests. Grading is very time consuming, and regrading a test because a student simply isn't happy with the grade they earned is a horrible waste of time.
When I was teaching my policy was to reconsider anything a student felt was a mistake in grading, as long as it was accompanied by a written memo explaining precisely what the mistake was. I found this to be a good way to ensure I was getting legitimate regrade requests, since students would only put in the effort to write the memo if they really felt something was wrong.
Basically, the idea is to discourage essentially spamming regrade requests as a zero cost effort on the part of the student that occasionally pays off.
That the teacher has made one mistake implies the teacher may have made more than one mistake, and there's some probability that those errors are in your favor. And if its really correctness you're worried about, rather than just going for a better grade, then you should be okay with a full on review. But you should be confident that there are errors, rather than just winging it for the occasional payoff.
There is a deeper lesson and that is that correctness is what you should be worried about. If you think that the paper was not graded correctly, then let it be graded again. You don't get to cherry pick instances of the truth that benefit you.
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.
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 evaluation has a role to play in order to improve teaching, but shouldn't be given too much importance for evaluating professors.
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.
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!
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.
This. When i look back at my school times - all those who i, let's say, hated back then are those who i now remember most fondly and who actually teached me something.
This is exactly my experience from when I was a professor. I drove my students to the maximum level I could and still keep my evaluation score just above the minimum (3.5/5). At the time they hated it, but later on they loved to tell me how much they learnt in my classes - their memory of all the work faded and they were left with the true feeling of accomplishment.
"... 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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).
Afraid not; professor in Philadelphia. I suspect that the professors who teach these kind of courses often get great reputations. ;)
I never actually took any of those classes from him (very difficult classes to get into), but I did have a creative writing class with him freshmen year. He gave me a lot of really good feedback that made it clear that he had carefully read what I wrote. A very good professor in his own right, but teaching those very popular classes could only help.
He primarily taught the Honors Calculus sequence, but would occasionally teach other courses as well. Many math majors went straight into analysis, so a good portion of his students were engineering and pre-med students rather than pure math majors.
His classes were notoriously hard, but he was so well-liked for four reasons:
(1) he was a gifted lecturer who put an immense amount of effort into finding clear explanations of every single concept -- nothing was spared from his relentless pursuit for clarity; he was also genuinely excited about the subject and was able to pass that excitement off to students.
I think students appreciated that, instead of putting his effort into creating some complicated class structure and a huge syllabus and fancy slides, he instead invested himself in finding the best possible explanations. There was definitely a sense that attending his lecture was a lot more valuable than reading the book, though that was always recommended too.
(2) he was very generous with his time and would always accommodate questions or requests for help.
(3) he took a keen interest in each and every student and kept up-to-date on everyone's individual progress; he never wanted anyone to accidentally get left behind. That doesn't mean that he'd give you a good grade out of sympathy, but it would be clear by the end of the class that you wouldn't have anyone to blame but yourself if you didn't do well. Even for the most jaded student, it's hard to be mad at the professor when it's made exceedingly clear that it's your own fault for not doing well.
(4) he was absolutely and utterly not pretentious in any way, and he was, in general, extremely kind; he had a way of making anyone feel welcome, even excited, to be in his classes, even if you weren't a math major or weren't very interested in math.
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.
I'd argue that most employers don't really care. They want to use degree, university, and sometimes grades as a first-round filter for screening applicants. Do they actually care if you took the challenging Philosophy course from the good professor, or the easy-A from the Roman History professor? Hell no. So if the primary thing you want is a job, why would you ever take the challenging class? If a professor is significantly and knowingly more challenging than their peers and they don't adequately convey that up front why shouldn't they deserve a bad review. Part of the job is conveying expectations, and in my experience it seems like plenty of professors who will challenge and push know they are like this beforehand but really don't do anything they convey this until after a student is committed.
I think that you're right that employers don't care about the specific courses that you took. I think you're wrong to assume that that doesn't mean that those who do take the more challenging courses do get ahead. The best networking I've done was in my challenging courses, where I met smart people who were also interested in learning and bettering themselves. My admittedly skewed and anecdotal evidence is that those people I knew who challenged themselves are now working at better jobs or going to better grad schools than those who decided to coast by.
I did not have a single situation where I did not know the difficulty of a course going in. While professors may not adequately let you know, any one of your friends or a number of websites make this information easy to obtain.
I feel like I might be alone in this, but I feel like if anything, a professor should warn you if they know that they do not challenge and push. You're in a university course -- it should be challenging. Courses should not be designed for an average student to excel.
Tell me about it. I TA for a physics class for premeds, and while they may find some passing interest in the course, they certainly don't care to learn it...and actually, I agree. May be a general knowledge of physics for someone going into medicine might be somewhat beneficial, but do I really expect my doctor to care about calculating the net force on a spaceship between the earth and the moon? Really?
I'm still at a loss for understanding why physics is required for the MCAT.
Ability in physics could be considered a proxy measure of student ability to understand abstract mathematical models. Or perhaps it's just another "are you smart?" filter.
Why not teach abstract mathematical models instead, or a may be something around quantitative models in biology? I'm all for my students learning abstraction and math but I think applications in biology would be more interesting and ultimately more useful for them than a mass on an inclined plane with friction.
"calculating the net force on a spaceship between the earth and the moon"
Well, that's your problem. There's a ton of physics that premeds should learn, but gravity is not one of them. Calculating electric potentials, forces etc. as applied to biological membranes would be infinitely better. Teach them the doppler effect, so they'll understand that ultrasound flow meter from the get go. Don't even get me started on NMR, PET, proton radiation therapy, ...
Well said. Biology, like chemistry, is actually a very complicated branch of physics. There's plenty of utility in understanding basic physics in biology. The doppler effect is a great example. Similarly radiation for imaging studies. Tension and compression. Optics. Fluid dynamics. Partial pressures. Electricity. Wave motion. So on and so forth.
There is so much physics involved in medicine, that it's bizarre to hear that premeds are taught about spaceships. Perhaps it's due to this strange perception some people have that physics is only about subatomics and astronomy.
Look, I'm a proud physicist, and it prides me to know that discoveries in my field have essentially defined generations, from the unification of EM with light to the transistor, physics has at a fundamental role in advancement of both technology and understanding of the world since forever. Still, a general description of how these technologies work should be enough for people who are not going into technical roles (like being the physician specifically uses the PET, etc), it probably not even need be quantitative. I feel like we focus far too much on the details instead of relevant results in our classes. For example, calculating the net force on an object to determine it's acceleration (Newton's second law) is vital for any physicist to understand. For a biologist? Not so much. Especially when the treatment of physics gets technically complicated (like you need to consider drag forces or something), the content becomes more tedium than learning especially for students who do not plan to go into that field.
You know, that's a very bold statement for someone who probably is not and never has been a physics educator. In order to make any sense out of even entry level physics and in some sense understand how it's unified, we teach (an often light) version of Newtonian mechanics; it's really rather strange, and usually far too abstract to teach Newtonian mechanics without simple forces like gravity near the surface of the earth. I also beg to differ about gravity, as it does play a role, albeit may not as large, when looking at things like kinetics of the body.
If you want to see someone who does an exceptionally good job teaching physics to the non-hard sciences, Brian Jones at Colorado State is kind of renowned in physics education circles as being one of the most effective in being able to convey lots of good meaningful entry level physics to soft sciences and pre-med.
I wouldn't call myself a physics educator, but I have TAed many physics courses, and I had a temporary employment at my university's physics department working on constructing new numerical term projects for undergraduate introductory physics. And really, electric forces and gravity are both 1/r^2 laws, and the field near the surface of a biological membrane is also fairly uniform, so why not calculate the forces on a virus instead? It's a matter of piqueing the interest of the students.
I remember constructing one numerical assignment for intro phys. for mech. eng. that was supposed to teach numerical integration of ODEs, so I had them set up Newton's second law for a soccer penalty kick, working their way up to including realistic air resistance plus Magnus effect. Boy, they were excited to be able to curve that ball past the keeper into the upper corner of the goal (this was Matlab and I gave them code to draw the path in 3D on a soccer field).
Physics should be taught to everyone, for one simple reason: this is the only science which studies a simple enough subject for all the classic scientific methodology to work really well.
So it is the most natural way to learn about scientific methodology in general. The other sciences are still largely in a phenomenology stages, while physics features multiple nice, small, tidy, very well-developed theories, and it is pretty much unique in this sense.
Medical students will find it much easier to comprehend the reason behind the double-blind method after comprehending the classic, simple Popperian methodology on the obvious physics examples.
It seems illogical to expect students to make an acts focused on selfless learning right at the point that you are making the teacher's position tenuous and thus forcing said teacher to be thinking about immediate self-interest.
Of course, a lot of the low ratings would also have come from some students who didn't have any grades at all from those later courses, because they didn't make it.
>> 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.
The problem with this is that society does not accept failure. Fail a few times in college and your GPA is irreparably damaged, you have to spend extra time (and money, oh god the money) retaking courses you "should" have passed on the first go.
I find myself gaining the most from courses where the professor destroys me. I spend all semester struggling with certain concepts and then at some point towards the end, once I've been exposed to the bigger picture, everything falls together and all the previous material I didn't understand now makes sense. The problem is that I've already been evaluated for the material. If I get a D in a course and retake it and get an A should I still have that D on that record, even though I arguably know the material better than someone who got a B on their first go?
While failure is probably the best way to learn, society conditions people to avoid failure like the plague.
Depends very much on the course. A lot courses are attended by a lot of students who just need the course to fulfill some requirement and want nothing more than to get a pass with as little work as possible.
Something to think about: My intro to philosophy prof felt the value of his class was the performance art aspect of sitting thru his admittedly pretty well performed Socratic method in class. The administration wouldn't let him skip finals, so he told us to write whatever we felt like writing to him, place whatever grade we felt we earned on the top, and that would be our grade. From memory the other CS students and I ganged up on him and convinced him to talk about brain-in-a-vat in class for a couple days so I wrote on that topic.
This could apply outside philosophy. I sat thru some chemistry classes that bordered on performance art working thru endless examples of problems in class. I think I pretty much learned quantitative chemical analysis by osmosis just watching the prof work problems. I still remember endless buffer solutions puzzles over 20 years later. Also ochem lab was self explanatory, its a practical lab class nothing more, from memory there was no lecture component beyond "this is the fire extinguisher, here is the safety shower, here is the eye wash station" etc. This could probably be extended to CS/IT classes, somehow.
I've heard about (but not yet read) studies indicating a similar relationship between patient satisfaction and outcome for medical professionals to the one between student satisfaction and outcome. There's a pretty strong negative correlation between the two.
Frankly, I'm not surprised. Back when I was TAing and tutoring, it was pretty clear to me that a great many students just wanted the high mark, and were much less concerned with how they got it. And I've had way too many conversations with people complaining about a doctor refusing to prescribe antibiotics for a viral infection.
Honestly, at the school I went to, I would've preferred to have the power to fire the administration versus the faculty. Most of the faculty are just fine. Some were great, most had their little quirks and a couple really sucked at their jobs, but that's true in most fields. The administration seemed to spend most of their time giving themselves raises and flushing money down toilets.
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 very hard to deal teachers with huge fail rates. Most students hated them.
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.
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.
How will we know that student ire will be directed at the right individuals? What are the right individuals anyhow? At my department in my beloved state school there are three full professors, each with no grants, paid USD 120000 for doing no research and giving one bad lecture per semester. Then there are several lecturers who are paid USD 40000, doing a better job at lecturing, and more lecturing altogether. We also have half a dozen assistant professors, who are struggling to bring in grant money and altogether doing an admirable job.
The great majority of the students doesn't know how the sausage is made and should well keep out of personnel decisions. They don't even know what the sausage is!
Idiotic and the adoption of it would destroy public universities, but I suspect that's actually the intent (just like the NC stuff about how professors must teach 4 classes a year).
Terrible idea. I went to a school where students had no problems calling mommy and daddy and the parents had quite the culture of bringing lawyers against the university.
The university had a rule of never taking these things to court, so they would always settle. Even when it was stupid things like students violating an attendance policy, failing their class because of it, and then getting off scott free beacuse their parents called a lawyer.
When I was studying CS in undergrad I took an upper level CS course that was suppose to end with learning assembly and building something with it. The class for whatever reason moved excruciatingly slow and we never got past the second or third project. The following semester my advisor who was also a cs professor pulled me aside and asked me, "what the heck happened in that class?" And after my answer he said he would take care of it.
For whatever its worth the professor that was teaching the class was and still is the head of the department. And the other professor I confided in retired the following year and moved to Florida. Probably unrelated, but I can see department politics fixing the issue of poorly taught classes.
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.
The thing that strikes me is how small the sample sizes are - most students really can't be bothered to fill out evaluations, and those who do are probably not an unbiased sample. There's often maybe a handful of evaluations per year for anything but massive lecture classes. It's hard to even make meaningful or realistic estimates of the quality of a teacher from that data.
Very true, but there are certainly ways that schools can up the response rates if they are interested. Some schools authentication systems that store a student's ID on one system when they complete the evaluation and the actual response anonymously on another system. You can then set policy to say, "Your final grades will not be released until you complete the course evaluation." I have also noticed that giving students 10 minutes at the beginning of the last class, with the professor leaving the room, helps the rate.
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.
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?
Let me rephrase it a little bit ..
What if in Kung-Fu Panda , the panda could fire his master . FIRE is very strong word , it talks about power over another , teaching is more of trusting some one and accepting someone higher .
I am studying media art at the University for Arts and Design Karlsruhe, Germany [1]. It was founded in the nineties, alongside ZKM, the Museum for new media [2].
One of the founding principles of the school was to limit professor tenure to three years, regardless of the performance. The idea behind it was to prevent the school to become a morass of old ideas and stay competitive in a new field.
It succeeded to a degree, especially with regard to the sheer number of different artistic positions that get to be represented at a small university. It is not without fault however - the quality of teaching is not constant; after a professor leaves there is oftentimes a semester of emptiness until a new one arrives.
And while the students can not fire a professor, they have a vote in the committee that decides which person to hire as the next professor.
One vote for the point of view that says I don't really much care how well-rated as teachers research professors are.
My tax dollars should be mostly supporting their research. Teaching should be a collateral duty. It is not a valuable use of time for good researchers. If we need superb instructors to teach basic material to undergrads, let them be called something else.
Is there really a single person on this forum who didn't do the bulk of their real learning outside the classroom, anyway?
It's not as prestigious, but a college without a graduate program will have teachers that are there just to teach. You get taught by professors not not teaching assistants.
That's fine and even important, but there are huge swathes of the American population that don't understand the distinction between research professors and folks like teachers, instructors, and lecturers. They get painted with one brush and, in this instance, are used to score political points with grossly ill-informed voters who have somehow decided that they don't like universities.
How does this not violate the Eighth Amendment: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. Automatic loss of job with no recourse can be seen as both an excessive fine and a cruel punishment.
In other news, a friend's wife here in Australia was an XO at a Navy training base. He told me that the base brought in a 'soccer card' system where the recruits could card the drill sergeants and make them face disciplinary action. This didn't take long to completely undermine the ability to make the recruits learn anything and waste the CO's time with meaningless disciplinary hearings, and was turfed out in short order.
As a student myself, in my final year of University and I do feel that there definitely needs to be more control/transparency where the tuition fees go.
The faculty that I am on is one of the lowest scoring areas of the university according to the National Student Survey. I assume this is due to the lecturers not having the knowledge or experience when compared to the students who are passionate about their field which they are currently studying for a degree in. Most have managed to get the job with little industry experience to share with students and don't have experience with a modern workflow such as using Linux, git, etc.
Personally, I would be much more happier if the lecturers have a basic salary but then allow students to give more of a percentage of their tuition fees to the departments that keep up to date with their field.
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.
I attended Deep Springs College, where students literally hire and fire the faculty. It works all right on a very small scale, when the students are committed to learning. Not so well when the students don't like the work that learning requires.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadEvaluations 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.
Profs that consistently get poor reviews are getting them for a reason.
And now students are much worse, they're expecting a "value for money", they want to be entertained. They do not like being pushed hard. Just look at all those disgusting stories:
http://sheffield.tab.co.uk/2015/01/29/devastated-economists-... (what kind of cretins can find such an exam "too complicated"?)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-31814659 (another bunch of morons enjoying a right to have their say)
This crap must be stopped. Once and for all.
There is absolutely no context in that article, and it shows a single question from the exam, yet you deduce that everyone that wrote and complained about it is a moron?
This is a two-way street: I've seen ridiculous student complaints, but I've also had terrible instructors. There are "cretins" on both sides of the table.
But HN is regularly bombarded with articles about colleges and universities being an over-valued investment.
But how can you chain that in the same sentence to a right to be entertained ?
You sound like Socrates (or better yet: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children...)
Would you go to a doctor who skipped a college? Do you want to drive over a bridge designed by a bunch of hipster dropouts? If not, then the higher education is still relevant, and all the hipsters must just shut up.
> But how can you chain that in the same sentence to a right to be entertained ?
I'm quoting one of the student complaints - that a lecturer is not "entertaining enough", and this is not "what they paid their money for".
EDIT: and yes, it's not the students who changed recently, it's the creeping commercialisation of the education system in general. Students are "consumers" now, and this is a new thing indeed. They should not be blamed for such an attitude, of course.
Simple question. Really convoluted answer. But the end payers are the students. And they want their money's worth.
Of course, the worth is derived from their uneducated selves, and "higher educated" peoples know what's best for them.
A percent of income for X years seems much fairer way of paying for education. But even that has its flaws. We have yet to see the full blowback from our current way of financing higher ed. My estimate is 20 years. And 2008 will be a walk in the park.
Instead, I imagine something different for a school. If someone fails a course, one has to retake it. This is silly if one is trying to learn. Instead, the answer is to stick with the area of problem until it is understood. But, because profit motives take hold, it is simply easier to fail someone.
The better answer for teaching is less material per class, shorter classes (vs 18 weeks), and quick to fail. And aside that should be no punishment to fail. In essence, aside laziness, it is both the teacher and the student who fail when a concept is not learned, but the onus lies purely on the student in our system.
I also believe that payment should be hinged upon future earnings, and not a ballooned sum payable in the hopes of a job. A percentage would be fair for X years... Of course I acknowledge that this could cause the liberal arts to falter. Marx and Engels divined this long ago with their analysis of capitalism and supremacy of what we call STEM degrees.
Education is selective and there is nothing wrong with it. Self-education is a very important part of it, and the only thing teacher really must consistently do is to help the students to identify their flaws as quickly as possible so they can go and address them.
But, yes, everyone must be able to retake any course any number of times, until either passed or pissed off.
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.
Um, have you been to a university? ;-)
When you think about it, the professors aren't (necessarily) there to teach either. They are there primarily for the opportunity to do research though that may be changing as many professors are part time minimum wage contractors.
Students, and probably just people in general, are really bad at knowing what they have learned.
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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9445924
[1] http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/evaluations14....
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775714...
It definitely applies. One of the best profs in my department often got poor evaluations in some of the first year courses she taught (which were required for everyone). But, she consistently gets excellent ratings for her 3rd year, 4th year, and grad courses (which were targeted for her specialty). She's known for being tough, but students can learn a lot in her courses and they actually do well. First years seem to think that they can get away with more because she's a short woman. She's had students try and suggest how to change her exams after midterms because they've taught swimming lessons. She once had a comment on RateMyProfessor.ca, "I'd say she worships Satan, but I think Satan worships her." It was eventually dropped after several years, but she wrote it in calligraphy and put it up in her office. We all thought that was very funny.
<3
edit: Added clarification.
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.
As in:
"I couldn't care less about this test." (literal)
"I could care less about this test." (sarcastic)
Yes, the actual expression is "couldn't care less" but I can easily see how people think it is "could care less" (in a sarcastic tone).
Same as "by the waist side" instead of "by the wayside." The term "wayside" is so rarely used now that people mishear it and rationalise the alternative definition that does make sense.
There are other examples too (correct on the right):
- Nip it in the butt vs. Nip it in the bud
- One in the same vs. One and the same
- You’ve got another thing coming vs. You’ve got another think coming
- Each one worse than the next vs. Each one worse than the last
- On accident vs. By accident
- For all intensive purposes vs. For all intents and purposes
- Extract revenge vs. Exact revenge
- etc
I understand the implicit preface that is something like "If you want to communicate frictionlessly …", but I think that one actually doesn't have to do this. The arguments for accepting variants of spelling do not, I think, automatically apply to accepting (illogical) variants of phrases; while there is no intrinsically 'right' spelling of a word, there is a sense (given what the constituent words mean) in which "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" are objectively different, and the latter captures what is probably meant.
I mean to say that it is perfectly possible to insist on, and to try to enforce, a logical approach to the use of language. (Without this impulse, for example, we wouldn't have Lojban (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban)—which, OK, may not be a very practical loss, but I think we can agree would be an intellectual loss.) Granted this will not optimise for communication, or pleasant social interaction, but we all have the right to choose the fitness metric that we want to use!
One of the worst lecturers I had at university (thought the course he was teaching was way beneath him and basically didn't give a fuck) also gave such extremely easy tests that basically everybody passed almost despite themselves.
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 your grade, give your test back to me and I'll give you more points". My friend, who got a 95, decided to give it back out of sheer curiosity and got back a 98.
Edit: Hey, I have another story about this dude: another friend of mine had him for a class. This friend is legally blind, so he once asked for more time to take the test since it takes him longer to read everything. A perfectly reasonable request: it's even listed on the form of accomodations offered by the university's Disability Services. Well, when the professor filled out the form, he granted my friend literally every single disability accomodation the university offered. He ended up with dozens of accomodations he didn't even ask for
The right way to do it is "if you don't agree with your grade, give me your paper and I will look at it more carefully. Of course I'm not just going to look at the question you're contending, but all of them. Your grade may go up, but it also may go down. Do you wish to wager?"
A very good high school math teacher of mine did this.
I think he did not get very many takers; the students were never confident that they would not lose more undeserved marks in the other question to more than offset any gain.
This moves regrade requests more toward "No, I checked over my exam again and I'm sure this is a mistake..." rather than "Maybe I'll pick up another point or two..."
WTF does that even mean?
Look, I'm a student. I'm supposed to make mistakes. It's natural for me to be wrong. I should be wrong many times now so that I can learn and not make those mistakes in the future.
But you're a teacher. You are supposed to correct mistakes. You are supposed not to make mistakes, or at the very least to be honest about those mistakes. You're not supposed to try to intimidate me so that I stop questioning you; you're supposed to encourage critical thinking and healthy scepticism.
In short: if a teacher hears that he made a mistake when grading it's his duty to check it again, carefully; and if it happens to be true he should be honest about it and admit it instead of threatening that he'll lower the grade even further. What your teacher said could be read as: "Ok, so I may have fucked up, but that doesn't matter, because I'm so much smarter than you and I can fuck you up in any way I'd like; do you want me to show you?" Your teacher probably didn't mean it that way, but I met a fair share of teachers who did; it would be best to stay away from such ambiguous phrasings altogether.
When I was teaching my policy was to reconsider anything a student felt was a mistake in grading, as long as it was accompanied by a written memo explaining precisely what the mistake was. I found this to be a good way to ensure I was getting legitimate regrade requests, since students would only put in the effort to write the memo if they really felt something was wrong.
That the teacher has made one mistake implies the teacher may have made more than one mistake, and there's some probability that those errors are in your favor. And if its really correctness you're worried about, rather than just going for a better grade, then you should be okay with a full on review. But you should be confident that there are errors, rather than just winging it for the occasional payoff.
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.
http://www.absurdnotions.org/page23.html
http://www.absurdnotions.org/page34.html
I think this type of evaluation has a role to play in order to improve teaching, but shouldn't be given too much importance for evaluating professors.
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!
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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
Michigan? Rabkin?
I never actually took any of those classes from him (very difficult classes to get into), but I did have a creative writing class with him freshmen year. He gave me a lot of really good feedback that made it clear that he had carefully read what I wrote. A very good professor in his own right, but teaching those very popular classes could only help.
His classes were notoriously hard, but he was so well-liked for four reasons:
(1) he was a gifted lecturer who put an immense amount of effort into finding clear explanations of every single concept -- nothing was spared from his relentless pursuit for clarity; he was also genuinely excited about the subject and was able to pass that excitement off to students.
I think students appreciated that, instead of putting his effort into creating some complicated class structure and a huge syllabus and fancy slides, he instead invested himself in finding the best possible explanations. There was definitely a sense that attending his lecture was a lot more valuable than reading the book, though that was always recommended too.
(2) he was very generous with his time and would always accommodate questions or requests for help.
(3) he took a keen interest in each and every student and kept up-to-date on everyone's individual progress; he never wanted anyone to accidentally get left behind. That doesn't mean that he'd give you a good grade out of sympathy, but it would be clear by the end of the class that you wouldn't have anyone to blame but yourself if you didn't do well. Even for the most jaded student, it's hard to be mad at the professor when it's made exceedingly clear that it's your own fault for not doing well.
(4) he was absolutely and utterly not pretentious in any way, and he was, in general, extremely kind; he had a way of making anyone feel welcome, even excited, to be in his classes, even if you weren't a math major or weren't very interested in math.
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.
I did not have a single situation where I did not know the difficulty of a course going in. While professors may not adequately let you know, any one of your friends or a number of websites make this information easy to obtain.
I feel like I might be alone in this, but I feel like if anything, a professor should warn you if they know that they do not challenge and push. You're in a university course -- it should be challenging. Courses should not be designed for an average student to excel.
I'm still at a loss for understanding why physics is required for the MCAT.
Well, that's your problem. There's a ton of physics that premeds should learn, but gravity is not one of them. Calculating electric potentials, forces etc. as applied to biological membranes would be infinitely better. Teach them the doppler effect, so they'll understand that ultrasound flow meter from the get go. Don't even get me started on NMR, PET, proton radiation therapy, ...
There is so much physics involved in medicine, that it's bizarre to hear that premeds are taught about spaceships. Perhaps it's due to this strange perception some people have that physics is only about subatomics and astronomy.
If you want to see someone who does an exceptionally good job teaching physics to the non-hard sciences, Brian Jones at Colorado State is kind of renowned in physics education circles as being one of the most effective in being able to convey lots of good meaningful entry level physics to soft sciences and pre-med.
I remember constructing one numerical assignment for intro phys. for mech. eng. that was supposed to teach numerical integration of ODEs, so I had them set up Newton's second law for a soccer penalty kick, working their way up to including realistic air resistance plus Magnus effect. Boy, they were excited to be able to curve that ball past the keeper into the upper corner of the goal (this was Matlab and I gave them code to draw the path in 3D on a soccer field).
So it is the most natural way to learn about scientific methodology in general. The other sciences are still largely in a phenomenology stages, while physics features multiple nice, small, tidy, very well-developed theories, and it is pretty much unique in this sense.
Medical students will find it much easier to comprehend the reason behind the double-blind method after comprehending the classic, simple Popperian methodology on the obvious physics examples.
It seems illogical to expect students to make an acts focused on selfless learning right at the point that you are making the teacher's position tenuous and thus forcing said teacher to be thinking about immediate self-interest.
Nothing provokes a low rating like failing.
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
I find myself gaining the most from courses where the professor destroys me. I spend all semester struggling with certain concepts and then at some point towards the end, once I've been exposed to the bigger picture, everything falls together and all the previous material I didn't understand now makes sense. The problem is that I've already been evaluated for the material. If I get a D in a course and retake it and get an A should I still have that D on that record, even though I arguably know the material better than someone who got a B on their first go?
While failure is probably the best way to learn, society conditions people to avoid failure like the plague.
Students are attending to learn and will give negative reviews when they are not learning as much as they expected they would learn.
Depends very much on the course. A lot courses are attended by a lot of students who just need the course to fulfill some requirement and want nothing more than to get a pass with as little work as possible.
I admire your optimism but I just don't think that's true in even half the cases.
This could apply outside philosophy. I sat thru some chemistry classes that bordered on performance art working thru endless examples of problems in class. I think I pretty much learned quantitative chemical analysis by osmosis just watching the prof work problems. I still remember endless buffer solutions puzzles over 20 years later. Also ochem lab was self explanatory, its a practical lab class nothing more, from memory there was no lecture component beyond "this is the fire extinguisher, here is the safety shower, here is the eye wash station" etc. This could probably be extended to CS/IT classes, somehow.
Frankly, I'm not surprised. Back when I was TAing and tutoring, it was pretty clear to me that a great many students just wanted the high mark, and were much less concerned with how they got it. And I've had way too many conversations with people complaining about a doctor refusing to prescribe antibiotics for a viral infection.
What if students could run the university?
I am not in academia, but in retrospective some of my greatest professors where very hard to deal teachers with huge fail rates. Most students hated them.
The great majority of the students doesn't know how the sausage is made and should well keep out of personnel decisions. They don't even know what the sausage is!
The university had a rule of never taking these things to court, so they would always settle. Even when it was stupid things like students violating an attendance policy, failing their class because of it, and then getting off scott free beacuse their parents called a lawyer.
Disgusting practice.
Perhaps professors should work for tips too /s
For whatever its worth the professor that was teaching the class was and still is the head of the department. And the other professor I confided in retired the following year and moved to Florida. Probably unrelated, but I can see department politics fixing the issue of poorly taught classes.
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.
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?
It succeeded to a degree, especially with regard to the sheer number of different artistic positions that get to be represented at a small university. It is not without fault however - the quality of teaching is not constant; after a professor leaves there is oftentimes a semester of emptiness until a new one arrives.
And while the students can not fire a professor, they have a vote in the committee that decides which person to hire as the next professor.
[1] http://www.hfg-karlsruhe.de/ [2] http://zkm.de/
My tax dollars should be mostly supporting their research. Teaching should be a collateral duty. It is not a valuable use of time for good researchers. If we need superb instructors to teach basic material to undergrads, let them be called something else.
Is there really a single person on this forum who didn't do the bulk of their real learning outside the classroom, anyway?
In other news, a friend's wife here in Australia was an XO at a Navy training base. He told me that the base brought in a 'soccer card' system where the recruits could card the drill sergeants and make them face disciplinary action. This didn't take long to completely undermine the ability to make the recruits learn anything and waste the CO's time with meaningless disciplinary hearings, and was turfed out in short order.
The faculty that I am on is one of the lowest scoring areas of the university according to the National Student Survey. I assume this is due to the lecturers not having the knowledge or experience when compared to the students who are passionate about their field which they are currently studying for a degree in. Most have managed to get the job with little industry experience to share with students and don't have experience with a modern workflow such as using Linux, git, etc.
Personally, I would be much more happier if the lecturers have a basic salary but then allow students to give more of a percentage of their tuition fees to the departments that keep up to date with their field.
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
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.
Who even uses the word "hobo?"
To be fair I was going through a faze where I was carrying my things around in a bandana tied on a stick... ;-)