🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 18 May 2005 beliavsky@aol.com wrote:

> Date: 18 May 2005 06:24:21 -0700
> From: beliavsky@aol.com
> Newsgroups: sci.stat.math, sci.stat.edu, sci.research.careers, aus.politics,
>     aus.general
> Subject: Re: Dropping standards
> 
>
> 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
>
>

So, all we need are sexy blonds in professor positions?