Chad has posted an interesting discussion of a study of students’ academic performance and how it is correlated to their evaluations of the faculty teaching them. The study in question is Carrell, S., & West, J. (2010). Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors Journal of Political Economy, 118 (3), 409-432 (DOI 10.1086/653808) . Go read Chad’s post for a detailed discussion of the methodology of the study, since it will likely answer your questions about my quick overview here. After the overview, I’m going to offer a few more thoughts on the explanations the study authors propose for their findings.
The study, done with data from the U.S. Air Force Academy (where there is a large-ish set of courses all students are required to take, to which students are assigned at random, and which are evaluated on the basis of common exams in which faculty are not necessarily grading their own students, etc.), found that:
Category Archives: Teaching and learning
IGERT meeting: some general thoughts.
About three weeks ago, I was in Washington, D.C. for the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting. I was invited to speak on a panel on Digital Science (with co-panelists Chris Impey, Moshe Pritzker, and Jean-Claude Bradley, who blogged about it), and later in the meeting I helped to facilitate some discussions of ethics case studies.
I’ll have more to say about our panel in the next post, but first I wanted to share some broad observations about the meeting.
IGERT stands for “Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship”, and the program is described thusly:
Final grades and missing student work: what to do?
Even though I got my grades filed last Friday (hours before the midnight deadline), this week I kept encountering colleagues for whom the grading drama Would. Not. End. As you might imagine, this led to some discussions about what one should do when the grade-filing deadline approaches and you are still waiting for students to cough up the work that needs grading.
I’d like to tell you that this is a rare occurrence. Sadly, it is not. Before we get into speculation about why students may be failing to deliver the deliverables, a quick poll on your preferred professorial response:
Final grades are nearly due when you discover that a student who’s done well on most of the assignments hasn’t handed in one of the major ones. What do you do?online surveys
Teaching and testing (or, your philosophy on final exams).
Since finals are nearly upon us here (and since I’m not quite ready to face the next stack of papers that needs grading), I got to wondering how other academics feel about when the final exam ought to be written and why.
So, a quick poll:
Friday Sprog Blogging: grading.
The Free-Ride offspring are pretty sure what I do for a living is grade papers. But seeing as how they’re both students, I thought I’d ask what the view of things is like on the other side of the red pen.
Dr. Free-Ride: When you come in and find me working on the weekend, what am I usually working on?
Younger offspring: Grading?
Dr. Free-Ride: Yeah. I know that you do a lot of homework and assignments.
Younger offspring: Mmm-hmm.
Dr. Free-Ride: And your teacher grades them.
Younger offspring: No! We correct them together.
Dr. Free-Ride: You correct it all together?
Younger offspring: Yeah. She doesn’t really look at them.
Dr. Free-Ride: What?
Repent! The end (of the semester) is nigh!
Yeah, still grading here. Yesterday I returned mass quantities of graded papers (with a free paperclip for every student!) and have another assignment to grade today … just in time for two more assignments which come due tomorrow. And then, the final exam!
Ever the optimist, this morning in the shower I wondered how things would turn out if the Rapture were to happen while I’m in the midst of all this grading. It’s the kind of hypothetical that demands a poll:
Question for the hivemind: where in the blogosphere do you find mentoring?
Yesterday in my “Ethics in Science” class, we were discussing mentoring. Near the end of the class meeting, I noted that scientists in training have a resource nowadays that just wasn’t available during my misspent scientific youth (back in the last millennium): the blogosphere.
What does the blogosphere have to do with mentoring?
From the annals of plagiarism: with friends like these …
As we creep toward the end of the spring semester, I noticed a story at Inside Higher Ed about a commencement address gone wrong:
CSU budgetpocalypse: what lies ahead.
I think I’ve mentioned once or twice that the California State University system (of which my fair campus is a part) has been experiencing a bit of a budget crisis.
Well, while there may be glimmers of hope for a recovery in the rest of the economy, we seem to be on the cusp of things getting much, much worse.
Ask Dr. Free-Ride: My college wants me to inflate grades.
A reader sends the following query:
I’ve only recently begun teaching in a big state university, maybe tier C in the field I’m in. I’m in a quandary as to how to manage pressure to pass students who are under performing. The first semester, I had to lower the passing to a basically ridiculous level and the college still inquired why so many failed (10 %). Now, I’m again feeling pressure to pass students who do not deserve to pass. I’m getting very disillusioned by this type of practice. Grade inflation seems to be so common that I even have students who think that a 60 is a B. I’m wondering what your thoughts are regarding this, and would appreciate any suggestions you might have.
How to grade fairly is one of those perennial questions with which academics struggle, and it would be sufficiently challenging even without pressure from students or administrative types. However, as my correspondent notes, there is also pressure from students and administrative types who want academics to change their grading methodology, so that they will get the grade they want for the amount of effort they are willing to put in, or so that the department or college will pass “enough” of the student population to satisfy the powers that be.
Let’s start with the question of how to properly calibrate a grading scheme and then move on to the related question of how to defend that grading scheme.