By Professor Doom
I’ve spent decades
in higher education, and there have been a few times I’ve been in danger of
promotion. Part of the reason I’m in such little danger of being promoted is
integrity: I have it, and it’s not wanted in higher education.
Thus, when admin
says they’re going to improve education by doubling the class size, I point out
that this isn’t true, obviously isn’t true, that nobody thinks “the larger the
class, the more effective the teaching.” I bother to
point out studies, but it does no good. Administration has their own
way of looking at education, and when class sizes get large enough, retention
does, arguably, improve.
What’s retention?
That’s the students not dropping the course. Of course, the reason why
retention improves in large classes is easy: the teacher has no choice but to simplify
the course and remove course content, to go at a slower pace. It’s why
“Powerpoint lectures and multiple choice tests” are the primary course type
now, because that’s the only way you can even do a little bit in a class with
100 or more students. Larger class size also means it’s much easier for a
cheater to slip through the cracks, and it’s more economically viable to steal
and sell the answers; it’s why there are websites now that sell the answers to
the entire course curriculum of some campuses (you’ll forgive me if I don’t
include links here…stupid low prices, though).
Another way admin
“improves” education is by opening up the rules for dropping college courses.
It used to be a student only had a few weeks to drop a course, and could only
drop a few courses in his whole college career. While these rules might seem
harsh, it made students take college seriously. By making dropping a course as
casual as changing a shirt, and making retention a measure by which faculty get
promoted, students can take the same course with half a dozen different
professors, keeping the course when they find a professor who is particularly
easy, or doesn’t do his job.
See how that
works? Don’t do your job as a teacher, and you’re more likely to get a
promotion in higher education. Around twenty years ago, I explained to admin
the obvious here, pointing out that letting students drop all they want would
mean that far less students would graduate on time, but admins didn’t care then
and don’t care now: graduating students on time is irrelevant, admin is paid
based on butts-in-seats, and thus don’t care about hurting education…and admins
sure didn’t like me using arguments based on integrity and common sense.
One of the most
popular measures for determining promotion as a teacher is student evaluations.
Naturally, the better the evaluations, the better the teacher, right? The
extreme emphasis on evaluations is why faculty don’t try to catch cheaters
nowadays—admin won’t get rid of cheaters (cuts into butts-in-seats, after all),
and cheaters give very bad evaluations to professors who catch them; one
professor’s lower pay for
catching cheaters solidly demonstrates how this works (the fool
actually caught over 20% of his class cheating—the gentle reader needs to
understand cheaters are this common because most professors aren’t so stupid as
to look for cheaters, and the students know it).
Admin:
“You’re still not dividing your class into groups for assignments? Your peers
are.”
Me: “I
respect that my peers can do what they wish in their class, but, as you might
recall, I provided studies that showed group work hurts students, they learn
less, and I want to help my students learn. Now, reasonable people can
disagree. Can you produce a study that shows the opposite, so that we can
discuss this like academics?”
Admin: “Our
consultant has plenty of evidence that group work improves retention.”
Me: “Yes,
retention. I’m talking about learning here, education, students improving in a
measureable way…”
Admin: “I’m
not going to argue with you, but I will be docking you points on your annual
evaluation. You are dismissed.”
--Yeah,
citing studies and trying to have a respectful conversation…no wonder I’m a troublemaker.
Another way
administration is hurting higher education is “group work.” Again, studies
have shown what common sense already knows: group work is a very limited
tool for getting a real education. Group work does increase butts-in-seats,
mind you, since group work means one good student (maybe) does the work while
the rest of the group sits there. Again, I produced studies showing that asking
faculty to add group work was hurting education…and, again, my reward for
acting with integrity to my students for not putting group work in my
mathematics classes was a kick in the teeth.
Admin
addressing all the faculty in a meeting: “Half of this department’s student
evaluations were below the median. You people need to improve!”
--Yes, the
deanling had a Ph.D. in Administration, and no, we didn’t laugh in his face.
Now, unlike the
other ways of hurting education, admin does at least have a point with student
evaluations—there really needs to be some means of determining if a teacher is
terrible, and, yes, looking at what students have to say certainly counts for
something. It doesn’t count for everything, however, and because the
relationship isn’t so clear, admin has gotten away with making getting good
student evaluations a major part of a professor’s job.
While worth
something, I’ve argued (of course) that evaluations are more about populatiry
than education. While the mouths of administrators
say education is all about “leadership” and their actions say education is
all about butts-in-seats, the simple fact is education is about improving human
beings. To get human beings to move ahead, sometimes the professor will indeed
need to give them a push. Some human beings, when pushed, will push back, and
yes, these are often the people that give less-than-stellar evaluations.
And so, I’ve
tried to argue that high evaluations, much like high retention, shouldn’t be
the main means by which a professor can gain the favor of administration, but
it’s done no good. Education isn’t so easy to measure as retention. On the
chance there are any administrators left who even care, I point out the
following study:
At the risk of
patronizing my readers, and the hope of educating any administrators deigning
to read this blog, allow me to explain what the highlighted result of the study
says: the better the teacher at educating students, the lower the evaluations.
“Negative correlation” between two things means as one thing gets better, the
other gets worse.
When it comes time
for promotion, there are many factors, such as committee work, developing
courses, student club work, and so on. But the largest, most important
determination of promotion on many campuses, especially the many (alleged)
teaching campuses that litter our nation, is student evaluations.
Keep that in mind,
higher education is so backwards today, that a student who learns he’s taking a
class with a teacher recently promoted due to “good teaching” is probably going
to learn less than if he took a class from a faculty that administration
insists is a bad teacher.
Seriously, a
student wanting to get a good education nowadays should first go to
administration and ask “who are the worst teachers on this campus?”
Administration won’t honestly answer that (of course), but if they did, those
are the teachers a student looking to get an education should take.
Of all the many
signs that higher education is mostly broken right now, this might not be the
largest…but it’s another sign all the same.
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