🚀 go-pugleaf

BMJ wrote:
> Deep Fried Lettuce wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> >>>>Thresholds have
> >>>>been lowered for grades, my wife was an adjunct prof at a local
> >>>>community college and she was not allowed to give anyone less
than
> >
> > a C
> >
> >>>>and she knew students that should not have passed.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>This is happening globally.
> >>>
> >>>Some of the kids in my son's law class ( at one of the elite Group
> >
> > of Eight universities)
> >
> >>>simply should not be there.
> >>>
> >>>But they will be permitted to pass and inflict themselves upon
> >
> > unsuspecting clients.
> >
> >>That's because one of the purposes of a post-secondary institution
is
> >
> > to
> >
> >>guarantee student success, whatever that's supposed to mean.  I
> >>concluded that to many of them, it's being amply rewarded for doing
> >
> > next
> >
> >>to nothing or playing the system to one's favour.
> >>
> >>It scares me to think that I might be crossing a bridge or entering
a
> >
> >
> >>building that some of them might have had a hand in designing.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > so why in the hell are the standards in this and education in
> > general being ALLOWED to slip lower and lower evey few years?
> >
> > And as for marks why is it that grades are always artificially
inflated
> > not reflecting the true nature of a student's performance?
> >
> > Exactly who was the bizarre person that thought this would be a
good
> > idea?
>
> Twenty-five years ago, I was working on my first master's degree.  I
was
> a TA for soem courses and I began noticing a lack of discipline in
the
> students even then.  Many thought they could get away with things
that
> I, as an undergrad just a few years earlier, wouldn't have even
thought
> about trying.
>
> Between the time I finished high school and I had those students,
> standards started slipping.  Allowing calculators into school
classrooms
> was one of the biggest mistakes that could have been made as students

> saw they were no longer required to think.  When I was an undergrad,
I
> used a slide rule until nearly the end of my second year.  The chief
> benefit of that, however, was that I was required to not only reason
my
> way through problems, I had to clearly show what I was doing when I
> wrote them up for submission.
>
> By the time I started teaching as an instructor over fifteen years
ago,
> the rot had irreversibly set in.  When I started, some of the exams I

> set were closed-book.  By the time I quit in 2002, none of them were.

> In fact, if I restricted the students to only one textbook during an
> exam, the students would go and complain behind my back, with the
result
> being a severe reprimand for being harsh.
>
> I packed it in when I saw that students were graduating who not only
> failed courses, but couldn't qualify for supplemental exams.  The
> business got too weird for me.
>
> Who let things slide?  There's enough blame to go around:
>
> - [g]overnments that allocate funding based on graduation rates and
student
> "satisfaction",
>
> - administrators who emphasize self-esteem over self-respect and
actual
> learning, and

The following paper, which can be downloaded from
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=426763 (membership
is required but is free), confirms your view that student satisfaction
should not be overweighted as a measure of teaching quality. Objective
measures of student learning should be given more weight.

Web-Based Student Evaluations of Professors: The Relations Between
Perceived Quality, Easiness, and Sexiness
JAMES FELTON
Central Michigan University - Department of Finance and Law
JOHN MITCHELL
Central Michigan University - Department of Finance and Law
MICHAEL STINSON
Central Michigan University - Department of Computer Science
Abstract:
College students publicly rate their professors' teaching at
RateMyProfessors.com, a web page where students anonymously judge their
professors on Quality, Easiness, and Sexiness. Using the data from this
web site, we examine the relations between Quality, Easiness, and
Sexiness for 3,190 professors at 25 universities. For faculty with at
least 10 student posts, the correlation between Quality and Easiness is
0.61, and the correlation between Quality and Sexiness is 0.30. Using
simple linear regression, we find that about half of the variation in
Quality is a function of Easiness and Sexiness. Accordingly, these
results suggest that about half of the variation in student opinion
survey scores used by universities for promotion, tenure, and teaching
award decisions may be due to the easiness of the course and the
sexiness of the professor. When grouped into sexy and non-sexy
professors, the data reveal that students give sexy-rated professors
higher Quality and Easiness scores. Based on these findings,
universities need to rethink the use of student opinion surveys as a
valid measure of teaching effectiveness. High student opinion survey
scores might well be viewed with suspicion rather than reverence, since
they might indicate a lack of rigor, little student learning, and grade
inflation.

Keywords: Teaching, Evaluation, Student Opinion, Halo Effect
JEL Classifications: I21, J44, M51