Onus on the Bonus?

I’m probably missing something, but what’s to prevent a professor from entering into a prospective quid pro quo with a student, i.e.: Reward me upon your graduation for the A I’m about to give you?

Abbott Katz, at 5:55 am EDT on September 7, 2007

Plus ça change...

How Medieval! When universities began, a faculty member was an independent contractor paid by students — whatever they thought he was worth.

Dodge Johnson, Independent Counselor, at 6:25 am EDT on September 7, 2007

Great idea!

As an economist in training and a fan of good professors, I really like the idea of merit pay given by students to professors. This rewards professors who really care about students instead of research. As a result, this could help equate pay between faculty who focus on consulting and the like during the summer and those who choose to spend their free time exploring new pedagogical methods.

Robert, PhD Student, at 7:25 am EDT on September 7, 2007

Provide real choice

Real choice involves charters and vouchers that allow students to choose.

Not biased, closed-minded political operatives and tax-loving, parasitic monopolists.

Buzz, at 9:00 am EDT on September 7, 2007

Lollipoops and music

I see that Buzz the one-trick-pony is still buzzing away. Perhaps someone will swat him.

That aside, having students allocate money to professors will not attract the best teachers. It will attract the teachers who hand out lollipops in class, play pop tunes the lyrics of which are coordinated with the day’s topic, and give “feel good” pseudo-assignments (unless, of course, you consider those to *be* the best teachers). And if you offer people the prospect of thousands of extra dollars to do these things, many will happily comply, to the (further) detriment of the higher education.

Cranky Old Prof, at 9:30 am EDT on September 7, 2007

beyond merit?

Gee....

How about a tips jar and cut out the middlemen?

Seriously, as an academic advisor, I hear “I can’t understand his/her accent” and “the teacher is boring” often used as code phrases for “I don’t want to be challenged or learn in different ways...or challenge my own preconceptions.” Students often complain about having to read more than a 10 page chapter a week.

Before you react, I am NOT tarring all students with this brush. I am asking how can student evaluations be themselves evaluated, taking into account these biases?

Any faculty reward system needs to correct for the biases by those who do the evaluating: students, departments, administrators.

As an adjunct instructor, I value the comments by the students most engaged in my course. As an advisor, I value the feedback from students most engaged in their own intellectual development and administrators who have “been in the trenches.”

theron, at 9:30 am EDT on September 7, 2007

“What tools should colleges use to reward excellent teachers?”

I will admit my experience is mostly limited to large, research institutions. I have found though that most of my colleagues would not refer to themselves as a ‘teacher.’ I would bet that if you asked them what their primary responsibility is the first thing they would say is ‘research’, then may be something like, “Oh yeah, I also teach a class or two.” Unfortunate? Yes, but it reflects the reward system we find ourselves in. Teaching awards? Quaint.

Jim, at 9:35 am EDT on September 7, 2007

Easy and Hot

The research is pretty clear that there is a strong correlation between high student evaluations and the relative easiness of the course and/or the “hotness” (see, chili pepper quotient) of the faculty. Giving students the power to award merit pay would simply be a “monetization” of RateMyProfessor.com.

I teach at a large state work-horse university where we are regularly told that we are factory workers producing new workers for the economy. Our teaching load (4/4) is high enough and our tenure weighs student evaluations enough that there is a reflexive overall dumbing down of courses across the university; to make matters worse, our state funds each university and department by “butts in seats", giving faculty an even greater incentive to dumb down the class to keep the students from competing courses in other departments.

So in this scheme at my school, the dumbest, easiest courses would get most of the money, not without exception, surely, but in general.

The best teachers are those who are able to balance reasonable, university-level expectations with an ability to get the students to buy into their subject and teaching style. But the culture of university education in America today works against that, perpetrated on one hand by our market-rationale for higher education, which has permeated student consciousness; and on the other hand by “researchers” in Education departments who have reduced education to a numbers game using buzzwords like “accountability” and “assessment", and who, in an effort to “facilitate student learning” have actually empowered students to be lazy.

In a university environment where students resent doing homework of any kind and regularly whine about there being “too much reading” or having to write a paper (unless it goes directly toward their job in “business” after graduation), faculty must adjust their courses downward just to survive. While faculty at Research 1 universities may think of research as their first job (although that wasn’t my experience as a student at two such universities), those of us teaching the majority of students in America at “state” schools and community colleges have crushing teaching loads, requirements for research we can’t possibly meet, and administrations who enable and encourage the non-learning entitlement of the student body.

bkyu, assistant professor, at 12:00 pm EDT on September 7, 2007

First-year teachers will be broke....

I second R2’s comments and add a perspective from a discipline still largely limited to first-year coursework: composition. As a tenure-track comp prof, I mostly teach first-year writing. No matter how skilled my pedagogy, or how much my students liked or benefited from the course freshman year, they likely have forgotten me by senior year.

ms lynch, at 12:45 pm EDT on September 7, 2007

Student evaluations

First, there was a study in the 1980’s at Northwestern. I believe the authors were Riodan and Riodan (Sp???). They looked at several Calculus I classes and did a correlation between student evaluations and performance on the department final exam. They got a significant NEGATIVE correlation. Of course, there were many extenuating factors. This is a school with students with strong self motiviation, so maybe the poorer teachers’ students learned more because they were less dependent on the teachers explanations. It was calculus and not English lit, so maybe achievement was tied a bit more closely to nature not nurture. Maybe there were other reasons. I don’t think we need to extrapolate to claiming that “for higher success, teach poorly.” However, it does open a question about the validity of basing success on the students’ perception of how well someone is teaching.

Second, having taught mathematics and mathematics education, the nature of assessment varied in those two contexts. Success in a mathematics test tends to be reasonably well defined. A student can either prove a theorem, or he can’t. In a mathematics education course the assessments tend to be subjective and quality is measured by how well developed an argument is. Almost without exception when a student did not succeed in a math course he claimed either “I just can’t understand this material,” or “I didn’t study hard enough.” In a math education course the student claimed, “You didn’t read my rationale correctly,” or “You never explained the material well.” In other words in a math course, I was not blamed, but I was in a math education course. It seemed there was also a higher correlation between success and instructor ratings in math education courses (and I also tended to give higher grades).

Finally, teaching is not a simple task. To paraphrase an old expression I learned 40 years ago, “Teaching is more difficult than you thought it would be, even though you thought it would be more difficult than you thought it would be.” Let’s not simplify it to the level of Burger King’s “Have it your way.”

Fred Flener, Retired, at 1:50 pm EDT on September 7, 2007

Susan Feiner nails it. Got to love economists.

JBM, at 4:30 pm EDT on September 7, 2007

What qualifies students to judge teaching?

What qualifies students to judge teaching? Have they ever taught a course? Are the experts in the subject? This idea has all of the same drawbacks as student surveys.

doofus, at 7:35 pm EDT on September 9, 2007