next »

[southerntransplant]

I'm a student that (just finished undergrad), started reading some of chronicle and fell on these forums.  I was quite surprised by a lot of what is said on this forum.  It's like a crazy inside scoop on what a lot of professors think and say, some of it scary to be honest and degrading towards students, specially those "favorite emails" or "favorite conversations."  It makes me wonder if I was ever the subject of a favorite email or conversation.  I'm glad not many undergrads know about this.   

Don''t get too worried. The vast majority of students are not deserving of such mockery. Unfortunately, their rational, well-reasoned, and well-expressed exchanges are lost in memory, while the true howlers burn brightly for all time.

[terrifiedbythetruth]

Apparently my GPA is determined by insecure children... Another harsh realization that is more than a little terrifying.

I wonder how many of those who have posted here are simply upset due to negative reviews they received on RMP. More importantly, I wonder how many of those who received these negative reviews deserved them. If the content of this forum is any indication, I imagine almost all of them did.

I have primarily had excellent professors; I sincerely doubt any of them have posted here. So maybe my GPA isn't determined by insecure children, but surely other students' are. In all honesty I find the contents of this discussion to be thoroughly disappointing.

Hopefully the system works and you will all eventually be weeded out.

[conjugate]

Apparently my GPA is determined by insecure children... Another harsh realization that is more than a little terrifying.

I can assure you that in my classes, I don't determine a student's grade; students determine their own grades by performance on exams.  I think that's true of most of us here.

I wonder how many of those who have posted here are simply upset due to negative reviews they received on RMP. More importantly, I wonder how many of those who received these negative reviews deserved them. If the content of this forum is any indication, I imagine almost all of them did.

Your use of the word "simply" raises questions.  Is a negative review on RMP a simple thing?  There are times when such reviews are not thoughtful, reasoned critiques of teaching style or performance (which, in my opinion, few undergraduates are qualified to give) but emotional outbursts.

I have primarily had excellent professors; I sincerely doubt any of them have posted here. So maybe my GPA isn't determined by insecure children, but surely other students' are. In all honesty I find the contents of this discussion to be thoroughly disappointing.

This discussion is not aimed at you.  Furthermore, you might be surprised.  Even excellent professors have students that frustrate them, and who post negative comments on RMP.  Recall that RMP at its best suffers from self-selection bias.  I teach anywhere from 70 to 120 students per semester, and get perhaps 3 or 4 reviews per semester.  Do those reviews constitute a fair sample of my students' opinions, or do they constitute vindictive attacks by frustrated students who did not do the work?  My RMP ratings correlate very poorly to my student evaluation numbers, and the evaluations represent a far greater proportion of my students.

Hopefully the system works and you will all eventually be weeded out.

You might be surprised by how many professors say the same things of their students.

[bonn1997]

I wonder what the size of the statistical correlation is between RMP ratings and professors' ratings at their institutions. My guess is it's a lot higher than many here realize. At my previous institution, it correlated pretty well with the reputations on campus of professors, and the award-winning ones tended to have high RMP ratings.

[larryc]

I wonder what the size of the statistical correlation is between RMP ratings and professors' ratings at their institutions. My guess is it's a lot higher than many here realize. At my previous institution, it correlated pretty well with the reputations on campus of professors, and the award-winning ones tended to have high RMP ratings.

Some of us have noted the same thing here--but there are forumites who strongly disagree.

[busyslinky]

I wonder what the size of the statistical correlation is between RMP ratings and professors' ratings at their institutions. My guess is it's a lot higher than many here realize. At my previous institution, it correlated pretty well with the reputations on campus of professors, and the award-winning ones tended to have high RMP ratings.

I have cited studies in one of the early discussions on this issue that show this is true.

I tend to agree with this assessment since I have observed it with a number of colleagues I know well.

[onthefringe]

I wonder what the size of the statistical correlation is between RMP ratings and professors' ratings at their institutions. My guess is it's a lot higher than many here realize. At my previous institution, it correlated pretty well with the reputations on campus of professors, and the award-winning ones tended to have high RMP ratings.

I have cited studies in one of the early discussions on this issue that show this is true.

I tend to agree with this assessment since I have observed it with a number of colleagues I know well.

Looking at my colleagues, I agree that the award-winning, extremely good teachers tend to have high RMP ratings and the disastrously bad ones all have low ratings. I do think there's a class of effective, rigorous, teach to the upper 40%, non-warm-and-fuzzy professors who tend to have very low RMP ratings, but average to respectable student evaluation numbers, and good peer teaching evaluations. I thinks it's because the lower echelons of the class really don't like them (and write about it on RMP), while the upper echelons respect, but do not love them (Which translates to decent numbers on the in class evals, but doesn't inspire the students to go and post raves on RMP).

[titania]

Representativeness doesn't just depend on selection bias (who goes to the site) but also on the total number of ratings.  My husband has tons of entries on RMP while most of the faculty in my unit at the uni have on average 3-5 ratings, even though we teach maybe 150 students a year.  Our students just don't use it that much.  I can't imagine 3 ratings being an accurate sample.

[conjugate]

I wonder what the size of the statistical correlation is between RMP ratings and professors' ratings at their institutions. My guess is it's a lot higher than many here realize. At my previous institution, it correlated pretty well with the reputations on campus of professors, and the award-winning ones tended to have high RMP ratings.

Clarify "reputations on campus of professors."  Do you mean reputation amongst students, or reputation amongst knowledgeable colleagues?  I will admit the relevance to teaching quality of the latter, but not of the former.  Still, over three years, I have fewer than a dozen RMP reviews and 400 or so filled-out evaluations.  It's hard to see how the RMP reviews can give a fairer or clearer view of student opinion than the in-class evaluations.

[bonn1997]

Clarify "reputations on campus of professors."  Do you mean reputation amongst students, or reputation amongst knowledgeable colleagues?

Sure, both

It's hard to see how the RMP reviews can give a fairer or clearer view of student opinion than the in-class evaluations.

Why would it have to be one or the other? They serve different audiences. Unless your school publicly posts faculty evaluations (which I can't imagine), your potential customers (students) don't have access to them.

[traductio]

Clarify "reputations on campus of professors."  Do you mean reputation amongst students, or reputation amongst knowledgeable colleagues?

Sure, both

It's hard to see how the RMP reviews can give a fairer or clearer view of student opinion than the in-class evaluations.

Why would it have to be one or the other? They serve different audiences. Unless your school publicly posts faculty evaluations (which I can't imagine), your potential customers (students) don't have access to them.

My students are not my customers. I do not own a business, and they are buying nothing from me. I am a professor, and they are students, and that is a different relationship than business-client.

This doesn't mean that I can blithely disregard their needs. On the contrary, it means that I pay attention to their needs in a very different way -- the skills I teach are valuable only if they put in the effort to learn them. The onus for learning is shared, but it's as much theirs as it is mine, if not more. That is, if they want their education to help them become productive, thoughtful citizens.

It's not like they're buying a tube of toothpaste at Walmart. If they adopt the toothpaste-buying model of education, where all they're buying is a certificate that says they've checked off requirements x, y, and z, then they're wasting their time and mine.

[hegemony]

At my university, class evaluations are indeed publicly available -- they are online and accessible to anyone with a university account.

[titania]

At my university, class evaluations are indeed publicly available -- they are online and accessible to anyone with a university account.

Does that work well or does it just become a new source of gossip/judgment about everyone?  I would have been terrified of this in my first year teaching, but now I am not so sure.

[hegemony]

The numbers are available, not student comments.  I haven't heard any gossip about it.  We all know how different the numbers can be based on whether you're teaching a small class or a large one, a required one or an elective, upper-level vs. lower-level, etc.  So I don't think any faculty check them out to jeer at colleagues -- we all know we're vulnerable to low numbers next time we draw the hard classes, etc.  The faculty I know find looking up their own numbers traumatic, so there's not much incentive to go surfing the results.

[scampster]

I often look up RMP ratings of faculty where I am interviewing. The comments that describe personalities are often amazingly accurate, at least on a superficial level of getting to know someone over the course of one day as in an interview. Bob really was intense! And John was supernice!