Voting your professor out of the university

Zounds!  Here's another terrific idea for improving a university education: Let students vote "poor" professors out of the university. In other words, fire professors who get low teaching evaluations from students. What political party does this legislator represent? Anyone?  Anyone? Not having done the homework, the class simply waits for the answer to be given. TPP moves on. A hand is raised, a question posed, "Well, which party?" Ah, yes, well, you were able to get that from the article (see link above) you were assigned to read. Bing, dropped a tenth of a point right there. So many fallacies and misunderstandings are presented in this article TPP checked to see if it came from the Onion, but no, the Chronicle of Higher Education. Close. So where does one begin? Let's just take the most obvious. This hawk-eyed  legislator thinks 18-22 year olds are qualified to make such decisions because they are spending thousands of dollars for this instruction. Who is spending the money?  Mostly parents.  OK, TPP has 40 years of teaching evaluations that argue students really aren't qualified to determine what is and isn't good teaching. They know what they like and what they don't like. High on that list of dislikes is working to learn, studying. Many students end up in your classroom with the attitude that it's your job to educate them no matter what. And even if they make little or no effort their failure to learn is your fault. "I was so turned off by his attitude that students needed to work harder that I didn't learn nothing." And even in a low-stakes contest of determining faculty raises, in which teaching evaluations play some factor, some faculty shamelessly pander, and lots of students just eat it up. The highest teaching evaluations TPP has ever seen were "earned" by a colleague who was very entertaining and very, very easy. When team-teaching with this colleague my own evaluations suffered in comparison, and when teaching the same material without this colleague, my evaluations jumped up more than a whole point on average on a 5 point system. As an undergrad, TPP had one professor who was an arrogant SOB, a difficult and demanding teacher with an insufferable manner, but after a few years, TPP recognized that the man was simply a brilliant teacher who was way ahead of the curve in science education. He'd give you instructions for a lab, which of course we didn't read. There was a problem to solve. He'd walk into the lab, smile, and say, "Any questions?"  Nobody asked anything, so he'd say, "Good, good." And he'd leave, checking on the class at intervals. Some students simply got up and left too. Some of us decided to finally read the assignment. When we finally had decided what to do, discussed how to proceed, and finally had some questions, he was quite helpful. If students had used today's system of evaluations, no telling how low his evaluations might be, but his teaching influenced my own teaching for a whole career.  Now don't get TPP wrong, there are poor teachers and there are discerning students who recognize it and pandering when they see it. But they aren't the majority particularly in those larger lecture courses. You know maybe if 18-22 year olds voted in greater numbers this legislator wouldn't be so eager to put his fate in their hands. And there's much more that could be said about this legislator's misunderstanding of higher education, e.g., his failure to understand the role of research and scholarship in teaching, but TPP just recently touched upon this issue. Oh, yes, another suggestion from the party fixated upon improving higher education, the GnOPe.

Saving Faculty Time - An Administrative Fairy Tale

This is the time of year when you have to report, on the basis of a calendar year, what you accomplished over portions of two academic years and the summer in between.  So when your provost introduces a new system for reporting your productivity based on the premise that it will save you time you know you're about to get hosed.  Provosts do not care about saving your time; they want things to be easy for themselves.  So clearly the new system called digital measures is actually so they can quickly and easily generate a bean-counting report, and no question about it, Provost Plodder is a real bean counter.  TPP's rough estimate is that with about 10 times as much effort, a fraction of the information usually reported has been digitally measured.  In an effort to really evaluate quality teaching, teaching evaluations have been reduced to a single average number, not even average numbers in a list of categories (like when TPP got low evaluations for exams in a seminar class that didn't have any exams!), and no written comments either, just one number.  This is a banal as it gets and something TPP predicted would happen when teaching evaluations were introduced.  They want abstracts of your presentations, in 30 words, when the standard of our field, and many others too, is 300 words.  They want an abstract that's just twice as long as the title, and re-writing an abstract is such a time-saver!  And of course, any form that attempts to be a one-size-fits-all form across an entire university is destined to be a piece of crap, difficult to use, and of limited value.  Such forms generate apparent data because you are forced into entering things in some boxes in certain ways such that apples, oranges, and pencil shavings will end up being compared.  Apparently their idea is that as soon as you generate a bean (A student answered a question today; it was answered.) you run right off to the Internet and record the event digitally, so at the end of the year, you just push a button and an annual report is generated!  This way you waste little tiny bits of time throughout the year rather than writing a report at the end of the year.  It's hard to even figure out where to put some of the standard stuff let alone non-standard (yes, even in this day and age!) stuff like blogging, and other dubious activities.  Each and every entry wanted some piece of information that had to be looked up elsewhere to save even more time.  After all this is some form of public out-reach, an educational tool, largely botany, but edumacating people about higher edumacation too.  TPP spent as much time as he was able, and more time than it deserved.  So, if my provost reads this, digital measures really, really bites.  The most obvious piece of data is that this company is really selling this product like hotcakes, and the assistant provost who oversees the introduction will certainly be given a really good evaluation for this accomplishment, if they can find the right category.  Oh, there it is: Big Wastes of Time and Money: progress in assessment.

Teaching Evaluations - Filed away

Let me tell you about teaching evaluations. Students are quite good at telling you what they like and what they don't like, and mostly good evaluations correlate negatively and rather strongly with how difficult or how much work is involved, especially in non-majors or introductory courses. This is part of the problem when your supervisors pay too much attention to student evaluations without understanding the dynamic. When faculty are rewarded for good student evaluations, it leads directly and inevitably to pandering. Fortunately the various chairs of our department (seen them come, seen them go) have understood that you don't want to see universally rave evaluations, and of course, you don't want to hear that faculty are rude, inattentive, disorganized, etc. either. Fortunately the Phactor regularly polarizes classes, and fortunately the lazy, poorly motivated ones are out numbered on the order of 3 to 4 to one in my classes, so over all my evaluations are very good, but with enough flack to demonstrate that no pandering is involved. One of the big problems in junior colleges, and even many small colleges, is that student satisfaction is the supreme accomplishment. This is not a recipe that produces a challenging learning environment. But that's the way it goes. Students haven't changed that much over all these years; they still like and dislike the same things, but with some creative approaches, you can optimize the number that you can cajole into working hard enough to really learn something.