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> If faculty bonuses Oy. Faculty don't get meaningful bonuses. Like, a $100 gift card to the university book store is a really nice gesture for someone who rea

> If faculty bonuses Oy. Faculty don't get meaningful bonuses. Like, a $100 gift card to the university book store is a really nice gesture for someone who really went above and beyond. True story. Not only do they not get bonuses, but even their base salaries are often 1/2 or less of base salaries in industry. Meaning total comp can be as low as 1/3rd or even 1/5th for competitive applicants (100k vs. 300k is a pretty common spread in CS. The spread gets even larger for top-tier candidates because academia has a hard ceiling but industry is more than happy to throw 400+ and top-tier fresh phds...). >... included a mix of pass rates, success in subsequent classes, AND textbook cost, this problem would go away. It consistently amazes me that people underestimate the difficulty of perfectly projecting a high-dimensional approximation of an inherently unknowable quantity onto a single scalar. If it were actually possible to do what you prescribe, to reduce good teaching down to a measurable combination of measurable variables, then why on earth wouldn't we just replace all teaching with a reinforcement learning algorithm? Oh, and BTW, things like MyMathLab aren't even saving professors' time. They are saving graduate TA time. Those TA's are making 20k-30k a year. The reason that auto-grading software can charge a lot of money is that even horrendously underpaid graduate TA labor is extremely expensive compared to a software license. So, I think subjecting faculty to teaching metrics is probably a terrible idea, especially in STEM at lower tier universities. Recruiting is already hard enough. Doing so is not going to have the intended effect and might even cause a brain drain. Projects like this pilot are a much better idea. We should also have pilot programs for open-sourced auto-grading software and small NSF grants (e.g., $8k over 3 months -- a princely some for a grad TA!) to cover the cost of refreshing the question banks every few years.

deleted 8y ago
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iguy 8y ago
Agreed -- making alternatives, which are as good for the professor, and free for the student, seems like a great idea. Correcting incentives is indeed hard. My guess is that, with professors, the ideal is actually zero explicit incentive: teaching well, or passing lots of students, should get you no more money, and neither more nor less subsequent teaching duties. They will never all be great, but the ones who are great at gaming any reward system the administrators can think up, those ones are always terrible. And seeing them richly rewarded is disheartening for the more honest.
- ethbro 8y ago
  As the child of tenured research faculty (before they left for greener pastures), I'm well aware of the systemic dysfunction. But throwing up our hands and saying "We can't do anything perfect about this problem, so it's better to do nothing" doesn't make progress either. To the GP's "Projects like this pilot are a much better idea [than explicit incentives]", my comment was in continuation of the sentiment that "It doesn't matter if you have excellent, free materials, if economic incentives (for-profit publishers) dissuade faculty from using them." Will any system be gamed? Invariably. So we tweak it. And tweak it again. Weaning academia (and I'm specifically looking at community colleges and technical schools, who I know are far worse offenders given their lesser resources) off for-profit course material seems a just deployment of incentives and government resources, because it's a barrier to entry market rather than an ongoing investment. After materials of marketable quality are produced, the system is likely to be self-sustaining with the correct revenue direction. The only reason it hasn't been done is the cost of producing the initial materials, and the unwillingness of any one user to bear that entire cost.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

iguy 8y ago

Agreed -- making alternatives, which are as good for the professor, and free for the student, seems like a great idea. Correcting incentives is indeed hard. My guess is that, with professors, the ideal is actually zero explicit incentive: teaching well, or passing lots of students, should get you no more money, and neither more nor less subsequent teaching duties. They will never all be great, but the ones who are great at gaming any reward system the administrators can think up, those ones are always terrible. And seeing them richly rewarded is disheartening for the more honest.

ethbro 8y ago
As the child of tenured research faculty (before they left for greener pastures), I'm well aware of the systemic dysfunction. But throwing up our hands and saying "We can't do anything perfect about this problem, so it's better to do nothing" doesn't make progress either. To the GP's "Projects like this pilot are a much better idea [than explicit incentives]", my comment was in continuation of the sentiment that "It doesn't matter if you have excellent, free materials, if economic incentives (for-profit publishers) dissuade faculty from using them." Will any system be gamed? Invariably. So we tweak it. And tweak it again. Weaning academia (and I'm specifically looking at community colleges and technical schools, who I know are far worse offenders given their lesser resources) off for-profit course material seems a just deployment of incentives and government resources, because it's a barrier to entry market rather than an ongoing investment. After materials of marketable quality are produced, the system is likely to be self-sustaining with the correct revenue direction. The only reason it hasn't been done is the cost of producing the initial materials, and the unwillingness of any one user to bear that entire cost.