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I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve t

by bertil 13y ago

I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like “accent too strong, can’t understand what professor says” become a million-dollar problem, with a solution that is actually cheaper. Yale understandably knew that such platforms can be useful, but need some tweaking: anonymous reviews tend to aggregate YouTube-grade insults — and people who dedicated decades to their expertise do not react well to being openly and repeatedly described as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!” by entitled students who failed after submitting their papers a month late. “Open” and teenagers with social bias don’t mix nearly as well as one would love.

darkarmani 13y ago
> and people who dedicated decades to their expertise do not react well to being openly and repeatedly described as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!” by entitled students who failed after submitting their papers a month late. > “Open” and teenagers with social bias don’t mix nearly as well as one would love. Who cares about that level of reviews? The validity is weighted by the source and level of discourse.
- bertil 13y ago
  Many such websites don't really expect that, and present teachers by averages of all grades, unweighted by how articulate the review actually was. I have seen such websites rare last (and publicly shame) very demanding, very good at that level of teaching, socially awkward teachers — in a way so aggressive that can only de described as late-in-life bullying. I was part of a group of students who personally intervened to avoid a suicide.
mhewett 13y ago
A study showed that 90% of professors rate themselves as good or excellent at teaching. My experience from 18 years in college is that about 2% are excellent and about 20% are good. This is now my second favorite self-rating statistic, after "50% of males rank themselves in the top 10% in athletic ability".
- bertil 13y ago
  If you read my comment slowly, you'll notice that I do not rate teachers in absolute terms, or on a scale at all — I actually hate that (and, yes, I have grave concerns with your “2%” or “90%” because of that). What I did write was that some teachers, no matter how great, come with details (unmeasurable in most cases) that are problematic: their accent is the most common one; details that can be easily fixed (ask Pigmalion), but that rely on intelligent feedback. No numbers. I don't like numbers.
stared 13y ago
At my previous university (University of Warsaw) there was an anonymous wiki for opinions on courses and teachers. And it was useful, and people were civil (insults, which were rare, were being removed by community). So I don't see why anonymous reviews should fail in a similar case.
- bertil 13y ago
  My girlfriend studied in Poland. Her experience describes the polar opposite of all the anecdotes I heard from most American universities: extremely strict teachers, highly hierarchical relations, vastly more demanding personal work. In such a context, especially if it's espoused by students, I’m assuming that such a feedback community could work with minimal external control. I strongly doubt that with the ratio of entitled students in the US, and the authority they wage over other students, this would be nearly as functional there.
avn2109 13y ago
One of Yale's peer institutions has an anonymous review site [0] that has been working well for several years now. It doesn't have any YouTube-style vitriol that I can find, though it's possibly aggressively moderated. [0] http://www.culpa.info/ http://www.culpa.info/
- bertil 13y ago
  Great example, and I’m assuming that “aggressive moderation” was something that guaranteed its existence, and was what Yale wanted to see confirmed before letting another similar effort grow.
nmodu 13y ago
Your penultimate sentence contains some sweeping generalizations. Not everyone who submits a review for a class is motivated by spite. Of course, as with any voluntary review system, participation will come from those who are strongly opinionated. But that goes both ways (Also, I could be wrong, but I believe that the site only included numeric reviews...leaving no room for reviews such as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!”, or whatever that means). Some teachers ARE lousy. And some teachers present the course material in an engaging, captivating manner. And yes, some students are lazy. But others want to learn, preferably from the latter type of professor. Labeling any student who forms an opinion about a professor as an "entitled [student] who failed after submitting a paper a month late" reveals a lack of faith in the ability of a young adult to take a genuine interest in his educational experience.
- bertil 13y ago
  No sweeping generalisation: I simply wrote that academic executives react badly (all of them) to senior teachers (some of them) having a break-down after reading poorly written and spiteful reviews (no matter how few of them there are, and there always are some in a campus the size of Yale). > Some teachers ARE lousy. Very much so — I am one, and I’ve always told that most of my teachers at my school were criminally bad. (I did take steps to have some of them sent to jail.) I do not remember arguing the opposite.

by bertil 13y ago

darkarmani 13y ago

> and people who dedicated decades to their expertise do not react well to being openly and repeatedly described as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!” by entitled students who failed after submitting their papers a month late. > “Open” and teenagers with social bias don’t mix nearly as well as one would love. Who cares about that level of reviews? The validity is weighted by the source and level of discourse.

bertil 13y ago
Many such websites don't really expect that, and present teachers by averages of all grades, unweighted by how articulate the review actually was. I have seen such websites rare last (and publicly shame) very demanding, very good at that level of teaching, socially awkward teachers — in a way so aggressive that can only de described as late-in-life bullying. I was part of a group of students who personally intervened to avoid a suicide.

mhewett 13y ago

A study showed that 90% of professors rate themselves as good or excellent at teaching. My experience from 18 years in college is that about 2% are excellent and about 20% are good. This is now my second favorite self-rating statistic, after "50% of males rank themselves in the top 10% in athletic ability".

bertil 13y ago
If you read my comment slowly, you'll notice that I do not rate teachers in absolute terms, or on a scale at all — I actually hate that (and, yes, I have grave concerns with your “2%” or “90%” because of that). What I did write was that some teachers, no matter how great, come with details (unmeasurable in most cases) that are problematic: their accent is the most common one; details that can be easily fixed (ask Pigmalion), but that rely on intelligent feedback. No numbers. I don't like numbers.

stared 13y ago

At my previous university (University of Warsaw) there was an anonymous wiki for opinions on courses and teachers. And it was useful, and people were civil (insults, which were rare, were being removed by community). So I don't see why anonymous reviews should fail in a similar case.

bertil 13y ago
My girlfriend studied in Poland. Her experience describes the polar opposite of all the anecdotes I heard from most American universities: extremely strict teachers, highly hierarchical relations, vastly more demanding personal work. In such a context, especially if it's espoused by students, I’m assuming that such a feedback community could work with minimal external control. I strongly doubt that with the ratio of entitled students in the US, and the authority they wage over other students, this would be nearly as functional there.

avn2109 13y ago

One of Yale's peer institutions has an anonymous review site [0] that has been working well for several years now. It doesn't have any YouTube-style vitriol that I can find, though it's possibly aggressively moderated. [0] http://www.culpa.info/ http://www.culpa.info/

bertil 13y ago
Great example, and I’m assuming that “aggressive moderation” was something that guaranteed its existence, and was what Yale wanted to see confirmed before letting another similar effort grow.

nmodu 13y ago

Your penultimate sentence contains some sweeping generalizations. Not everyone who submits a review for a class is motivated by spite. Of course, as with any voluntary review system, participation will come from those who are strongly opinionated. But that goes both ways (Also, I could be wrong, but I believe that the site only included numeric reviews...leaving no room for reviews such as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!”, or whatever that means). Some teachers ARE lousy. And some teachers present the course material in an engaging, captivating manner. And yes, some students are lazy. But others want to learn, preferably from the latter type of professor. Labeling any student who forms an opinion about a professor as an "entitled [student] who failed after submitting a paper a month late" reveals a lack of faith in the ability of a young adult to take a genuine interest in his educational experience.

bertil 13y ago
No sweeping generalisation: I simply wrote that academic executives react badly (all of them) to senior teachers (some of them) having a break-down after reading poorly written and spiteful reviews (no matter how few of them there are, and there always are some in a campus the size of Yale). > Some teachers ARE lousy. Very much so — I am one, and I’ve always told that most of my teachers at my school were criminally bad. (I did take steps to have some of them sent to jail.) I do not remember arguing the opposite.