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This is a short commentary piece, not exactly much there. There's some interesting comments, the one at the top right now says "They are no doubt imprecise, bu

This is a short commentary piece, not exactly much there. There's some interesting comments, the one at the top right now says "They are no doubt imprecise, but for a majority of the faculty the scores form a tight bunch around a mean. Newer faculty are likely to have lower scores, so it is often times useful to sit down with them and review the feedback and talk about ways to improve. A few faculty members continually score higher than average, and I want to know why--perhaps they can help do some mentoring with the lower scoring faculty."

jimhefferon 8y ago
> mentoring with the lower scoring faculty Of course this comment assumes that higher scores means better teaching. FWIW, my experience both as a prof and as an evaluator of profs is that when students are reasonable good their comments, in general, are reasonably useful. After all, they are in the room and they see what is happening. The problem is that when students diverge from reasonably well-prepared and reasonably hard-working, their responses diverge from valuable. It is a kind of Dunning–Kruger, where you get evaluations that are hard to reconcile with any kind of learning goals standard. All this would be mitigated if there were multiple measures. But there are not, at least in practice that I've seen. It is a problem. As an evaluator you want to give people credit for doing a good job. But it can be hard to tell. As a prof for many years, I know how to increase evaluations. (I don't agree that it is grades; I recently had a fifth year review and calculated the correlation between my grades and class evaluations for those years and r^2 was basically zero.) But the things that increase evaluations are not very tied to increasing learning and are certainly not tied to increasing the amount of material covered.

jimhefferon 8y ago

> mentoring with the lower scoring faculty Of course this comment assumes that higher scores means better teaching. FWIW, my experience both as a prof and as an evaluator of profs is that when students are reasonable good their comments, in general, are reasonably useful. After all, they are in the room and they see what is happening. The problem is that when students diverge from reasonably well-prepared and reasonably hard-working, their responses diverge from valuable. It is a kind of Dunning–Kruger, where you get evaluations that are hard to reconcile with any kind of learning goals standard. All this would be mitigated if there were multiple measures. But there are not, at least in practice that I've seen. It is a problem. As an evaluator you want to give people credit for doing a good job. But it can be hard to tell. As a prof for many years, I know how to increase evaluations. (I don't agree that it is grades; I recently had a fifth year review and calculated the correlation between my grades and class evaluations for those years and r^2 was basically zero.) But the things that increase evaluations are not very tied to increasing learning and are certainly not tied to increasing the amount of material covered.