The problem, of course, is that if we drop the SET’s, then what does Council have to use for evidence when they evaluate us for teaching? Gary is right — peer evaluation, if regularized and done throughout one’s career, would be a much more reliable and -dare I say – fair way to evaluate us as teachers. But any kind of peer review requires more work from our peers. Council now specifies that department evaluations of teachers (for salary) should include such things as review of syllabi. How many of us do this, in a systematic way? How many of us have time to?

At the very least, it would be nice to feel that when we say “teaching excellence” we have some agreement on what that means. Does that mean that the students learn a lot? Does it mean that they enjoy their classes? Does it mean that the material is challenging and presented well (independent of measures of student learning and/or enjoyment)? Should we give more credit for classes in which the students are made _uncomfortable_ by the presentation of material, because it means that we are challenging them to expand their thinking? (In my experience, students who are uncomfortable rarely write positive evaluations.) How do we distinguish “uncomfortable because legitimately challenged” from “just plain uncomfortable” on the basis of student evaluations? I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I do know that my salary is dependent on receiving good marks from my students. This strikes me as a less than healthy situation.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not opposed to student evaluations. I read them, and sometimes I find that the comments in them result in changes in the way I teach. That, in my view, is the principal use to which they should be put. My concern is that they are significantly used by the college to evaluate my “effectiveness” (whatever that means), and they are not reliable enough to be used for that, except perhaps in a subsidiary role to other, better defined measures.

However, I don’t think there was any reliable difference between classes that were in the 3+ and 4+ range. Differences depended on how hard it was, whether it was required and unpopular, whether I challenged the students and pushed them out of their comfort zone, whether students who liked me were in the class, or how close the evaluation was to the last test.

In other words, I don’t see the problem with using student evaluations to judge whether or not the professor has designed a solid course and created a good learning environment. I do think that there is a problem saying that there is a minimal set number you have to reach or making fine distinctions in either the upper OR the lower range.

Having read the full NYT article, I would also like to take umbrage with the assumption the author made that ‘liberal’ students in a ‘liberal arts’ college would inherently ‘like’ classes on ‘whiteness’ or a historical treatment of race. IMHO, students who go to good schools – like Williams and Wesleyan, in the article, or like Oberlin – are fundamentally conservative. Not politically conservative, but truly conservative. They work hard, dot their i’s and cross their t’s, study, and work strategically to get good grades. That’s why they got into the schools they did and that’s why their parents were willing to pay for them to go. I don’t think this inherently selects for student who are comfortable being challenged about race, who want to take risks in their learning or their grades. It will tend to select for students who are conservative and protective about their grades.

The danger of relying on course evaluations as the main means of judging pedagogical success is that faculty who do push students may have some great successes, but also be soundly rejected by others. A pattern of lots of high marks and a block of lows will result in an overall ‘average’ rating. But that’s really different from having a professor who gets uniformly average marks.

The End Of Expertise?

06 Sep 2008 04:38 pm

A bit from an interview by Harry Collins author of Rethinking Expertise:

I would say that the danger to democracy that my own discipline—social studies of science—is not doing enough to combat is the collapse of the idea of expertise. Current social studies of science has difficulty with the notion of expertise. The attitude that anyone’s opinion on any topic is equally valuable could spread, and there are some indications, such as widespread vaccine scares, that suggest it is happening. A world in which there is said to be no difference between those who know what they are talking about and those who don’t is not one that anyone who thinks about it wants. Such a society would be like one’s worst nightmare, exhibiting many of the characteristics of the most vile epochs of human history.

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