Re: Professors Beware: Students Are Doing the Grading, Announces RateMyProfessors.com

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
 L Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Detector195 wrote:
> 
> > Second, teacher ratings are simply proportional to grades,
> >
> >therefore your job is 100% easier if you hand out easy grades.
> >

I'll jump into this disuccsion as I've been rated on RateMyProfessor.

I taught at a 2-year technical institute for several  years and I have 
to agree with that statement.  Those groups of students I had the most 
grief with were often those who expected to have an easy time in my 
courses.

>   Rich Felder's web site (on effective teaching for engineering) lists 
> several citations
> of reports showing that student evaluations tend to correlate pretty 
> well with teaching
> abilities. Students know when they're getting a snow job, and when 
> they're getting
> someone who knows and cares what they're talking about.

Not necessarily.  One can be quite knowledgeable about a subject and 
present it in a clear, rational, and logical way, without using too much 
jargon and still be hated by the students.  If they expect material to 
be delivered like an MTV music video, try not to rely on a chalkboard 
and their imaginations.

I've had courses where I'd spend up to, say, 20% of my time re-teaching 
material that students were supposed to have learned in previous terms.  
There was no such thing as expecting them to brush up on that material 
on their own time.

> 
>   The one thing that students want above all else is fairness. If you 
> tell them the rules
> before hand, and then stick to them, they'll deal with it. They may not 
> like the fact
> that your class requires two or three times as much as any other class 
> they have, but
> they will adapt - especially if you show them why the material is 
> relevent to them.

I've found that consistency in how each course is handled is what they 
want.  I've had classes that constantly complained why I didn't do 
things like Mr. X and the fact that Mr. X wasn't teaching the 
course--and I was--didn't make any difference.  

More often than not, I was expected to adapt to *their* learning styles.

> 
>   If you want to guarantee poor reviews, just treat the students 
> unfairly. Assign readings
> from the text, then never discuss the material. Make sure your tests 
> have nothing to
> do with the material you covered in lecture. Spend your lectures being a 
> "regular Joe",
> talking about the football team, skiing, and anything else that's not 
> related to the course
> topic - then hit them with the test from hell. In short, do everything 
> in your power to
> make grades strictly a matter of luck.

That'll sink one for sure.

But I've also had students who were accustomed to, say, 85+% in high 
school and expected to get the same or better in my courses.  Let them 
have a bad day and choke on an exam, guess who got blamed?

> 
>   The other thing that will guarantee poor student evaluations is 
> incompetence. If the
> students think you don't know the material, you're dead meat. They can 
> live with
> instructional incompetence if they have to, as long as they have a 
> decent book and
> you let them know what you expect them to learn in the course. (I had a 
> process
> control course where the instructor almost literally read to us from the 
> text. Fortunately,
> he gave the day's homework assignment at the beginning of class. I was 
> usually able to
> ignore him and read the assigned material and finish the homework by the 
> end of the
> day's lecture.)

On the other hand, I've had students who were more concerned about the 
upcoming class ski trip than in paying attention to what I was 
presenting.

> 
> >2. It reduces grade-grubbing, the universal practice where students
> >line up at the teacher's office after every exam and assignment, to
> >wheedle for a couple extra points.
> >

I faced that constantly, especially from some who figured that less than 
90% was a failure.

>   I made it very clear in my classes that any and all requests for 
> regrades - even if it
> was because I made a mistake adding up the scores - were to be submitted 
> in writing.
> The students were to identify the problem that they thought I had 
> mis-graded, and
> explain why they thought my grade was in error. Requests that boiled 
> down to "I don't
> think that mistake was worth 10 points" were automatically rejected - 
> they had to
> show me why I had missed something that demonstrated more knowledge than 
> I had
> given them credit for. (BTW - The original exam had to accompany the 
> request.)

That would be a good approach, but, in my experience, quite impractical.  
I often had whiners who decided that they were "just learning the 
material" and, so, shouldn't be graded too harshly.  When I was a TA a 
few years ago, I had one student who decided that she was going to have 
at least 90% on her lab report and wasn't about to discuss the matter.  
I ended up giving it to her just to get her out of my hair.  Getting 
students like that to haggle for marks wasn't worth the effort.

> 
>   This policy cut down on the post-test hordes outside my office 
> significantly, and usually
> the students only got an extra five points out of the effort. There was 
> one student, though,
> that apparently wasn't much of a linear thinker. I could not follow the 
> work on his exam
> page, and the final answer was wrong, so I took off big points. Away 
> from the pressure,
> though, that student was able to explain the procedure he had used, and 
> identified exactly
> where he had gone wrong to get the wrong answer. I felt very comfortable 
> adjusting his
> score because I could now see where the different parts of the solution 
> were on the original
> test sheet.

I tended to give most of the marks on the concepts used and the logic of 
their solutions.  Often, I might point out where they made their mistake 
or where I thought they did if I couldn't figure out what they wrote.

> 
> Rich Lemert
>