4 ms·

When I was a grad student, 2 years ago, I was the teaching assistant for Operating Systems. I was responsible for all the grading in the class and the professor

When I was a grad student, 2 years ago, I was the teaching assistant for Operating Systems. I was responsible for all the grading in the class and the professor told me to give everyone A's no matter what on the assignments and quizzes. Most of the students had little to no understanding of the material. The professor said he was up for tenure that year and he was afraid that if we handed out bad grades the students poor evaluations of him would keep him from getting tenure. I wonder if universities put to much stock in the opinions of the students. I'd imagine that the professors eveluations would be heavily skewed towards the negative if they grade their students performance accurately. I'd expect, if grades were some how a normal distribution which they probably weren't, that the students doing poorly in the class would give the prof low marks and the students doing well would give the prof meaningful marks - some percentage of which would be negative.

physcab 17y ago
It's funny you bring up that anecdote about tenure because I had several professors tell me that exact same thing. Except in my scenario, I had brought forward allegations of cheating and the full professors were the ones to get behind my cause while the up-for-tenure ones (generally) looked the other way.
DrSprout 17y ago
Student evaluations are there to determine how effective the professor is at teaching. Only talking to the students the professor succeeded at teaching gives you a completely skewed and overly rosy perspective. Also it may surprise you that some people have such poor self-esteem that they will in fact take on blame themselves for their failings, even when an objective analysis might show that another professor could have made that student succeed. Conversely, a high performer might falsely believe that their success occurred in spite of the professor's incompetence, when the professors actions were a key part of the student's success.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  Student evaluations may be there to determine that, but they don't do an effective job. If you make the class difficult, students will hate you. If you are easy, they like you. There are a few other tricks you can do to get better evaluations: sympathy, good looks, and jokes. It doesn't matter if they learn more in your class than they would elsewhere, since we don't measure learning. If we really wanted to determine how effective the professor is, we would standardize exams and compare student performance across sections. We don't do this, probably because we don't really want to know the results.
  - DrSprout 17y ago
    Standardized tests stunt the curriculum, forcing an inflexible notion of what is worth knowing onto students. How, for example, do you have a standardized test to judge undergraduate research? Doing something absolutely absurd based on a fundamentally untrue proposition, so long as you put a lot of effort and thought into it, is an essential part of the academic endeavor. (The key of course being that there is no such thing as a fundamentally untrue proposition, and one can start with a premise generally believed false to produce a useful result which proves the premise true.) Peer review and student evaluations together give a much better picture of a professor's ability, and recognize that professor's ability to truly challenge students, not merely parroting the general wisdom. Obviously, there are inviolable facts, and it's important to recognize them - but learning is more than understanding that which is generally accepted to be true.
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      Standardized tests don't stunt the curriculum, they merely define it. They force an "inflexible notion of what is worth knowing" only as much as a syllabus does. For example, I'm forced to teach eigenvalues, but I don't get to teach about linear programming, even though I think linear programming is well worth knowing. That's because eigenvalues are on the syllabus, but not linear programming. This would not change if someone else, rather than me, designed my final exam. All standardization does is give you a mechanism for comparing my students to yours. Obviously you don't use a standardized test for research credits. But you do use it for already known material taught in class. In fact, many graduate schools do exactly this - the standardized exams are called "written qualifying exams."

physcab 17y ago

It's funny you bring up that anecdote about tenure because I had several professors tell me that exact same thing. Except in my scenario, I had brought forward allegations of cheating and the full professors were the ones to get behind my cause while the up-for-tenure ones (generally) looked the other way.

DrSprout 17y ago

Student evaluations are there to determine how effective the professor is at teaching. Only talking to the students the professor succeeded at teaching gives you a completely skewed and overly rosy perspective. Also it may surprise you that some people have such poor self-esteem that they will in fact take on blame themselves for their failings, even when an objective analysis might show that another professor could have made that student succeed. Conversely, a high performer might falsely believe that their success occurred in spite of the professor's incompetence, when the professors actions were a key part of the student's success.

yummyfajitas 17y ago
Student evaluations may be there to determine that, but they don't do an effective job. If you make the class difficult, students will hate you. If you are easy, they like you. There are a few other tricks you can do to get better evaluations: sympathy, good looks, and jokes. It doesn't matter if they learn more in your class than they would elsewhere, since we don't measure learning. If we really wanted to determine how effective the professor is, we would standardize exams and compare student performance across sections. We don't do this, probably because we don't really want to know the results.
- DrSprout 17y ago
  Standardized tests stunt the curriculum, forcing an inflexible notion of what is worth knowing onto students. How, for example, do you have a standardized test to judge undergraduate research? Doing something absolutely absurd based on a fundamentally untrue proposition, so long as you put a lot of effort and thought into it, is an essential part of the academic endeavor. (The key of course being that there is no such thing as a fundamentally untrue proposition, and one can start with a premise generally believed false to produce a useful result which proves the premise true.) Peer review and student evaluations together give a much better picture of a professor's ability, and recognize that professor's ability to truly challenge students, not merely parroting the general wisdom. Obviously, there are inviolable facts, and it's important to recognize them - but learning is more than understanding that which is generally accepted to be true.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    Standardized tests don't stunt the curriculum, they merely define it. They force an "inflexible notion of what is worth knowing" only as much as a syllabus does. For example, I'm forced to teach eigenvalues, but I don't get to teach about linear programming, even though I think linear programming is well worth knowing. That's because eigenvalues are on the syllabus, but not linear programming. This would not change if someone else, rather than me, designed my final exam. All standardization does is give you a mechanism for comparing my students to yours. Obviously you don't use a standardized test for research credits. But you do use it for already known material taught in class. In fact, many graduate schools do exactly this - the standardized exams are called "written qualifying exams."