Following up on the discussion of teaching evaluations, I thought I’d mention courses that tend, in my experience, to be more prone to getting bad course evaluations. By “prone to getting bad course evaluations,” I mean that these courses, independent of how well they are taught, or how well the students retain the information, are nonetheless likely to be low-rated for other reasons. Today, I’d like to introduce gateway courses
There are more undergraduates planning to go to medical school than there are openings in said medical schools. Institutions don’t want to graduate a lot of pre-med majors who will never be able to get into an onshore medical school. The result, at many undergraduate institutions, is the gateway course. This is a course, coming early on in the student’s undergraduate existence, that is designed to weed out people who aren’t really committed to becoming doctors, or who don’t have the skills necessary to thrive in medical school. Some professor is given the job of designing a course so unrelentingly hard, so horrifically evil, so sadistically impossible to get a good grade, that all the excited young first years whose mommy and daddy had dreamed of them being a top-flight surgeon suddenly discover the wonders of Public Policy.At Cornell (where I did my undergraduate work) that course was Chemistry 207 (note the number of labs to get a sense of the enrollment; contrast that with later Chemistry courses). Chem 207 came early in the medical school requirements and more people foundered on its rocks than even on naturally evil courses like Statistics. Chem 207 was one of those legendary courses that was spoken about only in whispers. After the first set of midterm exams (‘prelims’) came more heavy drinking than almost any other night of the year, but in a glum “I have to change my identity and flee the country so my parents won’t be disappointed in me” kind of way. The result was exactly as Cornell intended: lots and lots of students switched majors and many fewer graduates applied to medical school.
As a undergraduate history major my only connection with Chem 207 was in commiserating with my friends who took it. That is, until senior year. That year, in mid-December, I was sitting in the Uris Library Fish Bowl studying when I noticed another student across the room trying to push his chemistry textbook into his backpack. He was failing and becoming increasingly agitated. Finally, he gave up, and heaved the offending textbook against the wall. "@%@#$%@%! Chem 207,” he said loudly. "*(&&)(*( med school,” he said louder. “I*^&*& this *&(&*(&!” he said even louder, heaved his backpack after the textbook, and stormed from the room. There was a cautious smattering of applause and then we went back to studying. Finals were coming up, after all.
You can imagine what kind of student evaluations the course gets. I offer these. Or these. Or these. Contrast that with the ratings that Chem 208 gets here. That course, the successor to 207, is largely comprised of 207-veterans who have survived and prospered. Everything after 207 is, relatively speaking, cake.
Chemistry 207 will likely never get good reviews. Gateway courses are aimed at dissatisfying the majority of their students, and the evaluations suffer accordingly But 207 serves its purpose in ensuring that graduates who apply to medical school will have a solid chance of getting in, and those who would not have that solid chance will find out early. But that kind of long-term view is not captured by the each-course-its-own-island nature of student evaluations and it illustrates that, despite Ezra Klein’s insistences, sometimes the customer is not only not right, but, in fact, has to be wrong.