Hi
On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Richard Pisacreta wrote:
> In my opinion, student evaluations are almost useless (I get good ones).
>
> Freshman have no basis to grade college profs.
>
> The #1 variable that determines course evaluation is expected grade in
> the course. Profs who show lots of movies, drop the lowest test, let
> attendance count for 25% of the grade, etc. tend to get good evals.
>
> Profs who make students work get slammed. One of my favorite evals was,
> "Pisacreta sucks. I had to study every week in order to get a decent
> grade."
Richard does not seem to recognize the inconsistency in his first
and later comments ... that is, he is an example of someone who
is tough and gets good evaluations. There are many such people.
Listmember John Damron (who I noticed attempted to unsubscribe
recently) has a negative view of evaluations (people might want
to search for his extensive material on this), as do a number of
others, but I think that the total picture is probably somewhat
positive. Why wouldn't undergraduates sitting in a class for a
semester or a year be able to evaluate whether the prof is
organized, interesting, available for students, and the like?
That is probably why undergraduate ratings correlate so highly
with trained observers (e.g., Harry Murray's work with graduate
student observers). And there is surely much cognitive and
educational research that would support the premise that being
organized helps learning and memory? I'm sure that faculty
evaluations suffer from many problems (what psychological
measures don't?), but that is no reason to forgo our commitment
to a scientific (i.e., empirical, well-founded theory) approach
to practice ... in this case the practice of teaching. We can
hardly criticize other psychologists (e.g., clinicians) or other
disciplines for not adopting scientific approaches if we are not
willing to do the same for our own professional activities.
Best wishes
Jim
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James M. Clark (204) 786-9757
Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax
University of Winnipeg 4L05D
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark
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