In my grad school, quite a few of the grad students in the sciences and engineering fields are from Asia, including countries like China, Korea, India, and so on. While the application process for grad school required a certain level of English proficiency, the fact is that a level that was acceptable for admission was not, in the view of some people, good enough for teaching in the classroom. While the grad students from south Asia are nearly always proficient in English, those from China and east Asia often are not.
I managed to track down a column that appeared in the university’s undergrad newsletter back in 2004 addressing this issue: Physics: more English, less Chinese:
The author is kind of a jackass, and he’s wrong about English being the “officially recognized language of the United States,” but i do sympathize with undergrads who attend an English-speaking university and are confronted with teachers who can’t communicate with them in the institution’s language of instruction.
Here’s a more recent article about how the university attempts to deal with the problem.
I think what the students say is way more important than a score. Each student is going to use a different scoring system. Some are going to default to all 5s, while others apparently default to 3s. And then there are those like me who agonize over every choice and almost never give out 5s, because that implies perfection and no one is perfect.
So do you have any particularly negative comments written about you that you you think are actually credible?
BTW, do professors not get the actual sheets? Because I can imagine that people who actually took the time to offer an intelligent rank would actually try to explain their lower ranks. It would be nice to be able to match them up.
Also, it’s possible that students in other sections are marking their instructors down for being difficult to understand, etc, and then giving them “make-up grades” on the relevance/usefulness because they feel bad about being all negative all the time.
Back when I taught, I did some investigation into student ratings of profs. I basically had all the student evals for all the teachers for the previous 5 years (which was a bear to get but was finally granted it because some administrators were curious as well).
Background - I was tasked with evaluating the part time instructors which is how I started questionning the value of student evals.
Items found:
The correlation between grade and eval score was over .8. That is huge.
I then went further…
Since I couldn’t do this for men, I did it for women profs. I basically gave them a 1-5 rating on physical attractiveness. I tried to do it without age discrim but just a ‘look good’ rating. The results, though not nearly as close as grades, were good.
Basically, I could predict what the eval score would be with just knowing the grades given out and the ‘attractiveness’ of the prof (using my crude measure of this).
Student evals are worthless except as a tripline measure - when large amount of student evals are negative then there was something going on and required a looking into. For that reason alone I was in favor of keeping the evals. A scalpel it was not.
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As many profs find out - if you want high evals then you must do the following:
Grade easy but give the appearance of being a little tough…that way students don’t think you are a marshmellow.
Get the weaker students to drop before drop date. The best way to do this is give a test early and make it somewhat tough. Students will drop like flies but since these are your weaker students they would give you luke-warm or bad evals (grade received highly correlated to student eval). then lighten up to easy grading. However, before drop date make sure to announce several times during class in the week of drop date about drop date.
During the week you are tasked with giving out evals, do it later in the week. The reason being that a student or 2 will have a grudge against you and will show up specifically to give you a bad eval. So, even though they don’t show up for class, they will attend the Monday and Tuesday classes so they can do this. By Wednesday they are tired of this and will resume normal class attendence (rarely show up). Heaven forbid…never ANNOUNCE that evals are tomorrow.
This last point may seem trivial but it is important…especially at where I taught where they used a 10 (!) point scale. This means that getting nine 10s and one 1 means that last person dropped your average considerably when in reality everyone loved you. They really should have done a trimmed mean where they throw out the highest and lowest 5% of scores…but since they didn’t getting rid of that student or two in the last point above made HUGE difference on your score.
{Prof Blinking Duck - who always had the highest evals of all math profs :)}
BigT, each college is a little different. In mine (business administration) we get to keep the actual sheets the students used, and so we get to read their comments. One semester, I taught for the math department and I never got to see my written evaluations.
This sounds very interesting! Did you publish your findings?
I don’t understand why you couldn’t also do this for men. You can’t rate another male’s physical attractiveness on a “look good” basis on a scale of 1-5?
When I was in college there seemed to be very little correlation between the most well-liked professors and her or his physical attractiveness. A sense of humor, an ability to communicate ideas and engage the students would win out every time over a set of bodacious tatas or impressive biceps. I suppose it depends on the school.
One possibility, i guess, is that the majority of the students were male, so it made sense to focus on the attractiveness of the female professors. I’m not sure what the gender balance in fields like math and engineering are these days, but there was a time when you would barely find a woman in those classes at the college level.
In my first year of college, in the late 1980s, i had a female friend studying engineering. She was one of 4 women in a class of 300.
When I have to give an eval for a professor or course, I try to be as honest as possible. If I feel like I have to give a low score, I’ll justify it with an explanation. For example, I had a professor who knew how to teach, but she didn’t know how to grade papers. I forget how the question was worded, but there was one about grading. Naturally, I gave her a low score about that, but I explained why I scored her so low. (For the record, several of my classmates had the same problem with her, so it wasn’t like I was whining.)
I always thought student evals should be correlated to the professor’s grading scale. If I grade on a “C” curve because I think “C” is smack is smack in the middle and that allows the maximum of finetuning gradations, but another colleague is passing out "A"s like they were Skittles all term because he grades on a “A-” curve, who do you think is going to get the rave evals? This is true in regard to the “grading” section–i.e. my “A-” colleague will get as many evals saying he is a tough but fair grader as I will.
Only Internally…I did have a full write up for all faculty/admin and we did have meetings about it. You know, I should have thought about publishing…why I didn’t I don’t know…probably because I was on the verge of leaving teaching and wasn’t thinking that way.
I was extremely uncomfortable doing it for women, let alone men. I thought I would be torn a new asshole doing what I did but since the result did so well I didn’t really take any crap for it. I could have had a female prof rate the males but never went that far.
This was an investigation, led by me since it was my responsibility to deal with part-timers, as to whether teacher evals had any worth. The answer we came up with was ‘yes - but only as an extremely blunt instrument’.
Working on it though made me realize how generally worthless the evals were.
This is interesting to me, only from the other side. I’m in grad school, and I’ve only given 2 profs negative evals. Both of those classes I had an A for the semester, and knew I had at least an A- for both classes when I filled out the evals. So it wasn’t sour grapes
One was female, the other male. I (and several classmates) savaged them, not because the grading was tough. We’ve had other instructors that were far more difficult. In fact, the most difficult prof in the program generally receives positive reviews because while he is a right bastard when grading, he is an effective teacher who presents well and engages the class and challenges the students. He isn’t well-liked, but his classes were valuable and fair and people recognize that.
No, these two in particular just weren’t competent. The female was normally a prof at the undergrad level in the business school, and just wasn’t up to snuff teaching the MBA level, particularly a working professionals program. She tried to communicate with relatively successful professionals in their 30s and 40s the same way she communicated with 18-22 year olds, which needless to say feel sort of flat.
The male prof was a great guy; enthusiastic and very willing to help. Unfortunately, he was incredibly disorganized. His level of disorganization made it harder to learn and apply the concepts from the class. The biggest sin, in many of our eyes, was his changing the syllabus on the fly and adding an assignment. Most of the successful students get the syllabus for each class for the semester and create a calendar of when to work on what deliverables as time management is crucial when attending grad school and working full-time in a career. Having a wrench thrown in the works in that fashion was an unnecessary difficulty and the guy got dinged for it.
Well, it’s a good thing for all you MBA students that no-one in the real world of business ever has to confront unexpected schedule changes and altered deadlines.
No wonder you get poor evaluations. If you’re too ignorant to see the obvious flaw in your comparison, I imagine you probably aren’t very good at your job. So, just to spell it out for you:
If the prof in question were signing a check for me to cash, then you might have a point. As it is the other way around, I think he should have his shit together enough to stick to the syllabus and not drop an extra assignment on us out of nowhere. Or be on time for class. Or actually be prepared to discuss the topic and use the modeling software instead of spending 3/4 of the class receiving instruction from the students.
Huh. It’s a general practice for most professors to put a disclaimer in the syllabus saying that it is subject to change at any time. I do agree, though, that assignments worth major points shouldn’t be dropped on you unexpectedly.
In an ideal world, there would be no need to change the syllabus at all. But a good teacher should be willing to change it if s/he believes that the class will benefit. Last semester, it became clear to me early in the course that a lot of my freshman students were going to have trouble coping with the number of papers i intended to set for them, so when i handed back the first assignment, i told them i was cutting one of the papers from the syllabus. I could have kept it, just for the sake of sticking to the original syllabus, but that would have done no-one any good.
As you suggest, i make clear on my syllabus that i reserve the right to make alterations as i see fit. I also note that students will receive plenty of notice of any changes, especially changes that affect the due dates of written work. I never drop any last-minute stuff on them, and always announce changes in class, by email, and on the course website.
