Global Breaking News - Monday, December 23, 2024

Professors and the Students Who Grade Them

At the end of each academic term on many U.S. campuses, students complete evaluations of their course instructors. It is a process that has been criticized for years, and yet it shows a very common desire: to find an effective way to weed out the bad apples. High-stakes evaluations are in vogue not only in higher education but also in elementary and high school. Are college students’ evaluations of their instructors a useful way to assess professors? What might be more effective?
* weed out = 잡초를 뽑다; 바람직하지 않은 것을 제거하다/ high-stakes = 이판사판의, 흥하든 망하든/ be in vogue = 유행하고 있다

 대학생들의 교사 평가가 교수들을 평가하는 유용한 방법인가요? 무엇이 더 효과가 있을까요?

1. Bad Data That Leads to the Wrong Answer
Student evaluations can be useful when they are divorced from tenure, retention and promotion, and performed anonymously without feedback going to higher-ups.
 
2. As Long As It’s About More Than Scores
Student voices, when weighed and considered, influence teaching at places where professors understand that effective teaching is highly valued.
 
3. Our Motto: Give the Customers What They Want
Universities that don’t listen to their students are unlikely to survive big changes in higher education -- and frankly, they shouldn’t.
 
4. What We Saw
Our study showed that students confuse course grades with long-term learning, and reward those professors who hand out the A's.

Sample Essay

Bad Data That Leads to the Wrong Answer

Student evaluations are a poor indicator of professor performance. The good news is that college students often reward instructors who teach well. The bad news is that students often conflate good instruction with pleasant ambience and low expectations. As a result they also reward instructors who grade easily, require little work, are glib and chatty, wear nice clothes, and are physically attractive. It’s generally impossible to separate all these factors in an evaluation. Plus, students will penalize demanding professors or professors who have given them a bad grade, regardless of the quality of instruction that a professor provides. In the end, deans and tenure committees are using bad data to evaluate professor performance, while professors feel pressure to grade easier and reduce workloads to receive higher evaluations.

Student evaluations can be useful when they are divorced from tenure, retention and promotion evaluations. If a professor asks students to anonymously provide information on what works and what doesn’t in a classroom and come up with suggestions for improving the class, students can often provide valuable feedback. But this kind of information is essentially constructive criticism, an anonymous dialog between the professor and student. It shouldn’t be transmitted to higher-ups in university administration.

Professors do, of course, need to be evaluated as to how well they teach. If student evaluations were abandoned, how would this be done? For lower-division classes, it’s often possible to infer the quality of instruction by measuring how students perform, on average, on the next sequence in a study area (such as Spanish II or Calculus II). In upper-division courses, inferences can be made on instructor quality from the outcomes of graduates in the major area of study. One can examine whether a professor has inspired an unusual number (either large or small) of undergraduates students to choose careers in that professor’s subject area. Such outcome-based measures would require extra work, but they would also tend to be fairer and ultimately more informative than the bubble sheets filled out by students today.