There's an active debate going on in the blogosphere about this proposal to give $10,000 bonuses to college professors that get good evaluations. I think that this is a fantastic proposal.
Tenure requirements are back-assed. I see too much crap being published, just for the sake of publishing. Showing up prepared for class should be a basic requirement for getting tenure.
I don't buy the studies that show that student evaluations are worthless. A few months ago, I sat down with a retired professor and showed him Rate My Professor. We looked at the evaluations of the faculty in his old department, and he thought that the students had nearly always gotten it right. I'm sorry, but if you consistently get bad evaluations, you are probably a bad professor.
Of course, student evals alone shouldn't be the way of measuring teaching quality, but add in a few peer evals, and you've got a pretty good clue.
UPDATE: Stanley Fish discusses a new book and concludes the age of the professor is over. "The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of
education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and
inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to
deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment."
Apt. 11d 
I suspect its true that if you consistently get bad evaluations you are probably a bad teacher. That is a completely different proposition from “if you consistently get good evaluations you are probably a good teacher”. I doubt this is true. “If you consistently get great evaluations you are probably a great teacher” is false.
I do think that colleges could exert much more control over the evaluation process, e.g. by telling students what the evaluations are for, and at least ensuring that they know some of the ways that teachers can manipulate outcomes. But there is no reliable way of discounting for, for example, the difference between required and non-required courses, demanding and non-demanding teachers, etc.
So, I guess I’d be more comfortable with docking profs with very bad evaluations $10k than rewarding those with good evaluations with $10k.
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Ha. You’re probably right that excellent evals do not necessarily mean excellent teaching. But if you average that info along with peer evals and even evals from faculty outside of your discipline, I think you would get a fairly good idea of what’s going on in the classroom.
The problem is that too many universities don’t give the slightest interest in quality classroom teaching.
Actually, I think that trend is about to be reversed. Schools can’t afford to support professors that don’t have students in their classes.
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“The problem is that too many universities don’t give the slightest interest in quality classroom teaching.”
The funny thing is, I wouldn’t be surprised if quality teaching (or at least some facsimile of it) is a big part of what drives alumni donations. There’s a big time lapse, though. I’ve known two examples of major donations that have come in based on the donors’ memories of their educational experience at the institution 50 years earlier.
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Actually, for tenure decisions, you can factor in teaching effectiveness. Chad Orzel said, at his SLAC when he went up for tenure, the administration interviewed around 20 students who had taken his classes, randomly chosen (I think some were even graduated) from across the classes he’d taught. But this sort of reasonably accurate student evaluation doesn’t scale. Once in a career, it’s affordable. Every faculty member, every semester, not so much.
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I agree with Harry B–bad evals may correlate to bad teaching, but the reverse is not always true. As a friend once said, student evals always tell the truth–the question is, about what? Sometimes it’s about their grades, or their perception of the prof’s easy or hardness, or any number of other things.
When I went up for tenure my teaching portfolio included letters from randomly selected students. Letters requesting input went to students from every course I’d ever taught–so they had a good cross-section. (And, yes, many had graduated.) Even so, the ones who respond (in my experience–I wasn’t allowed to see my own responses) tend to cluster at the poles–people who feel strongly one way or the other. The same is now true of our regular teaching evals, since they are online and there’s no way to ensure that everyone responds.
“Throw in a few peer evals” sounds easy, but in practice it’s been impossible to implement them where I teach. But without them I’d oppose the bonus for good evals, too.
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Well, I certainly don’t agree that the $10,000 award is a “fantastic proposal” as is, for the reasons that so many of the skeptics have already put forward. And in any case, there’s nothing in the Texas A&M proposal that ensures that winners of the $10,000 award will get tenure because of their teaching, so it does nothing to solve the research/teaching balance that you describe. Most colleges and universities already have teaching awards to recognize the best — based not solely on student evaluations but on an evaluation of syllabi, student comments, and recommendations. So I tend to side with those who see the proposal as putting “looking like we are doing something to support good teaching” ahead of “actually doing something to support good teaching.”
That said, I think some of the objections to student evaluations can be mitigated. Most evaluation systems give Z scores both in comparison to all classes and in comparison to classes in the same department at the same level. So one can reduce the impact of intro vs. upper division courses and interdepartmental differences on how evaluations are tracked. It should also be possible to provide Z scores in relation to expected grade (though I’ve not ever seen that) to filter for pandering. But it is still difficult to filter for student expectations of what a professor is supposed to be like as opposed to how much the student actually learns as a result of taking the professor’s class.
I predict that the Texas A&M will not last long in the proposed form. And if it does last, I predict that a big row will happen at some point when either a die-hard lefty or righty wins the award because the professor “discouraged” people who disagreed with him/her from taking the course.
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“The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.”
And that’s very sad. Everyone is the poorer for this. It’s not the case that the emerging workforce is “better” for the university being more vocationally oriented; that’s a function of employers being less and less willing to provide on the job training which used to be a normal feature of employment.
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As for Fish’s quote, my guess is that while you can expand the portion of your society that is attends college, you can only expand the portion that wants to learn because they enjoy learning (instead of learning something in expectation of future reward) so far. If you remove other barriers to higher education, eventually you hit the same barrier you hit in high school (“Why should I learn this? I’ll never need it in real life.”)
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“The problem is that too many universities don’t give the slightest interest in quality classroom teaching…”
I’m calling hyperbole on this one. The biggish land grants I have experienced do care, at both the undergrad and grad level, often in ways more real than the SLAC I know all too well.
“Schools can’t afford to support professors that don’t have students in their classes.”
Huh? Of course they can, that’s what R1 schools are supposed to do for top flight researchers, right?
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See, I don’t think that statement was hyperbole. If universities really cared about quality teaching, they would do more to prepare young teachers. I was just tossed in a classroom with no advice about how to even properly grade exams. I had one adviser who helped me out enormously, but it was all on his own. Schools put a premium on research. It counts more for getting tenure than quality teaching. They hire adjuncts w/no experience to teach more than half their classes. Peer observations are rare. I taught at one top flight school for a year and nobody observed me even once.
I don’t think that R1 schools are going to be able to support top flight researchers anymore if they don’t pack the classroom. Maybe if they bring in a ton of grant money. The latest studies are showing that these R1 schools are going to be in big trouble. Bergen Community College’s admissions are through the roof.
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I’m not as worried about this as Laura, but from my experience she’s right about teacher prep. The only point where I’d differ is the ‘maybe’ before ‘if they bring in a ton of grant money.’
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However, with states cutting higher ed budgets, it’s unclear which higher ed category will be worse off in the end.
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