I always give good evaluations to professors that go out of their way to give me lower grades. You know, the ones that force the students to think and earn the damn grade?

what you expect, its human nature to give good evals to a easy teach/prof.


or

because they are so good, the students get more 'A's

but, i think its more the first.

hmmmm obvious tag anyone?

anyone who feels it necessary to publish this as the results of a study is wasting money.

Ain't that the damn truth AlgaeRancher

Minot State University is a glorified junior college in the middle of nowhere (even by North Dakota standards). Maybe their next study should be whether the sky is blue on a sunny cloudless day.

I give my dog food to stop her barking.

Instead of FUNDING that study, I would've told them the answer for like $50...

DUH...
Reward the behavior and you get more of it. Imagine that.

Most universities don't allow evails till grades are posted. Hmmmm. Must be the Hollywood upstairs school of medicine.

Used to do it all the time in college. Since my own self-interest (both short-term as a student and long-term as someone who could put "summa cum laude" on a resume) was at stake, how else was I supposed to answer those evals?

Mike_Bolton --

Your dog wants steak.

Gillamobster.... Ya, I switched over to beatings and it worked.

"Personally, I liked the University. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything. You've never been out of college, you don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

Can't say the same for my last semester's Accounting professor.

Mike_Bolton...I bet they do.

At Pepperdine University where I am currently attending, we give the teacher evaluation a week before the end of classes. We submit them to the administration, then only after the teachers have given us our grades can they look at their evaluations.

/ just my 2 cents

Where I teach, the evals are done before the grades are handed out. After handing in the grades, the teachers get to see the evals (with all identifying info removed, of course). So I guess the grades referred to in the article are for quizzes and things.
Of course, I teach art so there's no such thing as quizzes....

that must be why they give the students at my school the evaluations the week before finals. good teachers still get good reviews.

at my university, we do the evaluations the last day of class, but the prof can't look at them until grades have been given. the department secretary or someone holds onto to them until then.

they don't do shiat if the prof is tenured.

When are they going to do study on coeds?
Would a college professer give a good grade to a student
that would sleep with them?

Evidently they don't have much research sophistication up at Minot. A and B co-occur, which caused which or did both result from C? Well, with their research design they aren't in any position to say. I'm going to wager that either the journal they published that in is either not refereed or it is, and by amateurs.

They could have added a fair number of features to this to say something about the relationship between ratings and grades. They could have controlled for the overall GPA of the raters, they could have looked at the relationship over time for the same instructors, etc. Instead they did what unndergrads do in their intro to research methods class do: simple correlation. The big difference being that undergrads are taught not to infer causality.

Blankman:

But the kids love them!

Pestifer you know as well as I do that the professors (especially english comp) can often identify who wrote what eval.

Anyway, you'd have to be fairly clueless to not at least have a general idea of how well you are doing in a class.

Isn't it just possible that professors who teach well get good evaluations? Just a thought.

The real crime is in universities not releasing those very evaluations for public review. I honestly compelete evaluations for any professor, but never see the results.

What difference does it make? A lot of students have BS majors anyway. What do you call 4.0 psychology major?

Waiter.

PS. Harvard has been inflating grades for many years. They simply outlawed the bell curve. Oh, I hope the ivy league goons don't find me out.

Well, I suppose that this does have a basis. If the teacher is good, and makes the class interesting/entertaining, the students pay more attention and learn more.

Example: Grade 11 (currently) first term marks
Physics = 95%, Biology = 79%. Both sciences, but a huge difference in marks. The physics teacher makes the class interesting and open, while the biology teacher is boring. The teacher makes the difference.

Iron Felix

www.ratemyteacher.com

Off-topic, but that State of the Union speech was the biggest pile of shiat I ever heard in my life.

cgrabe -

For the sake of my students, I sure hope so! I've been a Professor for almost 10 years, and I have had consistently high evaluations from my students... but I'm not an "easy A".

I hold them to high standards, but those standards are very clearly articulated, and I am very fair in enforcing them.

Then again, I mostly work with graduate students, so they probably have a different idea of standards than undergrads do...

There should be a DUH tag.

TheJoe03
I support your threadjack. What a goofball.

I swear, I thought that said "give out lots of ass".

That would cetainly up the evaluation for many people of all types.

No shiat.

I just mark average for every answer. Unless they pissed me off.

PS. Harvard has been inflating grades for many years. They simply outlawed the bell curve. Oh, I hope the ivy league goons don't find me out.

I don't know about Harvard's grading policies, but I can say with some certainty that artificially imposing a normal curve distribution in classes makes about as much sense as imposing a sine-wave distribution of grades in classes. Saying that, "No matter how hard you all study or how bright you all are--half of you will fall below the 'C' mid-point. Tough luck." If they did that in graduate courses there wouldn't be any students by semester two (given that failing more than one class is not well tolerated by most faculty). The entire idea is to measure whether students have learned the material and can apply it to the world, not to fail people who have mastered the domain, but not as well as many others in the course.

"No matter how hard you all study or how bright you all are--half of you will fall below the 'C' mid-point."

Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass how hard you study? If you can't pass the test, you should fail. You must be from the generation that got trophies for participation. I predict a rough future for you in the business world. Someone along the line never explain to you sampling sizes. Take a class in statistics.

As a college professor, I can tell you that, although the general concept is really obvious, there are some subtleties that may not occur to everyone.

Different courses have different rigor, for example. A freshman chemistry or physics course is not nearly as rigorous as upper-division courses. Student evaluations generally dip when you teach the "hard classes", no matter how talented an instructor one might be. So, by tying the evals to pay raises and promotions tells us that we are better off teaching the lower level classes.

The same is true for different audiences by the way (engineering vs science vs humanities). Very few faculty here want to teach engineers because they are more apt to give lousy evaluations than other students.

Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass how hard you study? If you can't pass the test, you should fail. You must be from the generation that got trophies for participation. I predict a rough future for you in the business world. Someone along the line never explain to you sampling sizes. Take a class in statistics.

Actually, ass, I've taught college classes in statistics. You misunderstood me. I was saying that if you force a normal distribution, they can all study as hard as they like and learn as much as they like, but unless they all get EXACTLY the same grade then half will be put below 'C' and half will be put above. And this, my point went on to say, is not what examinations are intended for (i.e., forcing ANY distribution is wrong).

I've taught at the university level for 10 years and have never seen a bell curve naturally occur.

Ok, this study doesn't really do the job. Suppose a teacher really is awesome-- friendly, engaging, prepared, entertaining, and really knows their stuff. One would expect 2 conclusions: happy students and high grades from students. There's a good chance that that professor has really turned out a batch of highly capable students, and they'll be happy about it. So, the question that the study apparently does not answer is whether the evaluation marks in question are caused by the receiving of a high grade, or if the high grade and the high evaluation are both caused by great teaching,

Good instructors teach well. When one is well taught, one gets A's. Period.

We shouldn't expect to see one naturally occur unless there aren't any admission standards. The more heavily admission relies on indicators of general mental ability (e.g., SAT, GRE, etc) the more highly restricted the natural range of grades should be.

Good prof => prof teaches well => students learn well => students do well on tests => high marks

As an (Engineering) student, I would say that I (and most of my friends) do not give good ratings to profs just because they give high marks. I know a couple profs who routinely give high marks, but still receive a crappy rating. Of course, ratings don't really matter any more once profs have tenure.

And we (University of Toronto) also do evaluations before exams, but profs and TAs get their evals after marks are submitted.

cgrabe, uncle_dad: Student feedback for a single lecturer for the same subject in different years will often rise and fall in sync with the matching entry cutoff for that batch of students. If demand for your course falls and the entry requirements are reduced, students less capable arrive in the class, do badly and give negative feedback.

I always get "HE SHUD B FIRED" on mine. Of course these mostly come from the people who have been caught cheating.

What?!?! your going to flunk me? yeah piss off if im going to give you a good evaluation.

GIVE ME A's FOR A RAISE!!!

Catchy isnt it :-D

AndYouWillKnowUsByTheTrailOfBread

Actually, I teach only engineering, and my reviews have been quite high. I do give a lot of As, but I am by no means an easy grader -- in fact, I'm a downright difficult one, consistently much harder tham my colleagues. I've found that at leasy 90% of the students in the class have risen to every challenge I've given, and when I give a lot of high grades, it's because they did exceptional work.

There are lots of factors that contribute to instructors' evaluation scores, and not all of them actually have to do with how well they teach, though some of them do.

Virtually no university-level instructor will admit to being an "easy A," even if they actually are. Even at places where students don't see their grade before the evaluation, average grade and evaluation scores are correlated, and it's NOT always strictly because good teachers generate more learning meaning better grades. (Though actually being good doesn't hurt.)

In my intro psych course (as an undergrad student), the instructor got a standing ovation on the last day of class and I know (because the university published the numerical ratings) that he got great evaluations.

But the class was CRAP, I learned virtually nothing and the small amount of stuff I did memorize for the exams was BS Freudian nonsense. (And I'm a psych prof.) Why'd he get the standing O and great evaluations? He was an very animated and entertaining/humorous lecturer, and assigned very little work, even if the exams were curved and he technically didn't give out an abnormal proportion of A's. Entertainment + light workload = good evaluations from most students.

"I'll indoctrinate you and scratch your back,
and you be a good lil' leftist and scratch mine."

The sky is falling!

THE SKY IS FALLING!