The Chronicle has the story on this Iowa bill, here:
I know, my first thought was “what a great idea!” too. But the report does go on to note a few potential pitfalls. I don’t see any reason not to implement this for UO’s senior administrators and lawyers though.
Wow… way too much leverage for students. Don’t like that your professor actually cares about your learning, in a class that is required and you just want to skate through? Organize negative course evals!
This is an absolutely terrible idea and will only seek to increase the notion that the students are the employers of professors. That they are paying for a service to be provided to them and expect professors to cater to them as if they are service industry employees.
Tying this to evaluations will likely look like tying this to student grades, encouraging more grade inflation issues.
There are probably good ideas out there for cutting dead weight, but tying it to a Survivor-style undergrad vote is not one of them.
Give me an A or you’re fired.
Are you sure this isn’t from the ONION?
It is well known that the two main reasons for poor faculty evaluations is that the professor is bad or the professor is tough.
The tough, the bad, and the ugly: https://stat.duke.edu/courses/Fall12/sta101.002/CourseRatings.pdf
OK, this bill will go absolutely nowhere, so there’s no need to get worked up about it. It’s true that student evaluations are gender- and age-biased (and apparently appearance-biased too) and suffer from all of the flaws that you would expect input solicited from teenagers to suffer from.
On the other hand, it’s not true that there is no information to be gleaned from student evals. From what I’ve seen, students who take the time to fill out evals for the most part try hard to be fair and honest. There really isn’t a lot of axe-grinding, and it’s pretty easy to spot. Lousy instruction is usually called out as lousy instruction, and “tough” professors are called out for what they usually are: arbitrary and vague with their expectations.
The real danger of student evals is that students are terrible judges of what they’ve learned. But then again, I haven’t seen deans or departments do much better.
Oh, no, it’s not just the worst one. It’s ALL the ones that don’t meet some arbitrary standard of coolness, and then IN ADDITION a sudden-death vote amongst the five lowest scores that DID meet the ASoC (fewest votes to keep is off the island). With no attempt to cope with how that means if you’re in a tiny department/specialization you have fewer students to know you/vote for you, or to deal with the potential that everyone hates a particular core-curriculum class and so its instructor gets fired every term, or any of the other 1 million reasons this is a terrible idea.
Apparently the bill has already died in committee or something. But it’s telling that it came from a Republican in a state that generally has supported education very well. Wisconsin is another one, where Gov. Scott Walker really has it in for U.W. in particular and professors in particular. The mutual alienation of higher education and Republicans/conservatives doesn’t bode well for higher ed in the future.
Fortunately in Oregon the Democrats disdain higher education even more than the Republicans, so a pub resurgence probably wouldn’t hurt UO.
Someone got his 15 minutes of fame…
Why are we not giving all administrators on campus at least a yearly report card? I say we start them, publish them, and give them to the board.
“There doesn’t seem to be any qualification where the professor understands that when they leave at the end of the school year, they’re leaving with a couple hundred thousand dollars” …
Wow, I’d love a 390% raise in my salary. Where do I sign up? That guy really has no clue.