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How About A Little Something, You Know, For The Effort?

Jan 13, 2009
By .
Effluvia

Texas A & M professors are protesting a plan to award merit bonuses for teaching based on, gasp, student evaluations.  Because it's not as though their students are in a position to know who's a good teacher and who's not:

Martha Loudder, an accounting professor and a former speaker of the faculty senate at College Station, questioned the fairness of basing the awards “solely on student evaluation.” Ms. Loudder, who has received the university’s most prestigious teaching award, said she feared that “some very good teachers will be left out.”

Since the pilot program limits bonuses to the top fifteen percent, of course some good teachers will be left out:  every professor who fails to make the eighty-fifth percentile.  But I think Ms. Loudder doesn't give her students enough credit.  At a top flight university like Texas A & M, most students are there to learn, and may be best situated to determine who is doing a good job in that category.  Moreover, most good American universities follow the "publish or perish" model, where tenure, to say nothing of pay, is a question of scholarly citation rather than whether a given professor's students are learning, that is when the students aren't being taught by a doctoral candidate TA to whom the task has been delegated.

The Texas A & M professors complain that it would encourage some to "pander" but I can't tell what that means.  When I was a student I appreciated a good comedian, but if I wasn't learning something from the class, I was a heckler when the time came to give anonymous feedback.  I could also tell who was in the university because he was a scholar who disliked teaching (Hello, Professor "My passion is the law of the sea, and I really don't enjoy having to teach this Civil Procedure small section") and who was there to teach (Best wishes, Professor "I would probably be facing a Senate confirmation hearing right now, but when I left the DOJ I decided to go academic because I enjoy teaching").  If the concern is grade inflation, well that appears to be a nationwide problem with or without merit teaching bonuses.

Could it be that some Texas A & M professors don't want any feedback at all?  Good-looking people don't dread mirrors.

Via TaxProf Blog.

Last 5 posts by Patrick

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4 Comments

  1. Andrew  •  Jan 13, 2009 @11:28 am

    Student evaluations would be an effective indicator of teacher performance at my alma mater, a well-regarded liberal arts college with small classes and committed students.

    On the other hand, they would be a horrible indicator of performance at the community college where my mother taught for 25 years. She is a wonderful teacher and mentor for those students with strong work ethics and the desire to learn. Unfortunately, those students comprised maybe 15% of the student body. Most of her other students would probably give her negative evaluations because she's a tough cookie who grades fairly and doesn't believe in social promotions.

  2. Amy Sterling  •  Jan 13, 2009 @2:44 pm

    As someone who is so far doing okay on "ratemyprofessor.com" and who got top student evaluations at each school where I have taught previously (after a disastrous first semester as a graduate teaching assistant which I – gasp – managed to learn from), this one has been bashed about before in the academic community, almost to death.

    Most schools with faculty unions or union-like structures are highly resistant to basing anything on student evaluations. I can imagine that merit bonuses would probably send the majority of faculty to the moon and back.

    As a hardworking teacher, I'm not ready to slack off just because I know I won't get any more pay for teaching a) more students; b) taking extra time with students who need it; c) adopting up-to-the minute texts and changing assignments, lectures and methods each semester.

    Some faculty think it is okay to lecture with notes scribbled on yellow legal pads, that on close inspection, can be seen to have been originally white. They then express dismay that students point up their rigidity and shortcomings in evaluations or via their websites online. My sympathy level for poorly-evaluated teachers is not very high. I know a few excellent teachers who have received poor evaluations unfairly. These have never been the majority, or representative of their overall averages. I honestly do not know of a single case of a truly excellent teacher with ratings that are extremely negative. It's a case of some who are "legends in their own minds," I think – because academic pay is not that great in most cases (certainly not for law faculty as compared to private practice as you describe).

    I even tell my students now that I am an "arrogant" teacher because I won't accept that a student can't learn or grow. I believe I can reach any student no matter how they start the process – and my best allies in this effort are all of the students in the class. What kind of evaluations did Ward Churchill get? Probably sucktastic – the guy was obviously an ignoramus and an asshole from start to finish. It was gratifying to me that he was finally academically discharged, for rampant academic integrity violations. I bet he graded by the "stair" method (throwing papers down stairs, grading from F to A in order of where they landed). I could get angry when I think about the substantial number of fools, horrible teachers and other fruits and nuts with tenured sinecures out there like Ward Churchill before they finally jettisoned him. But then I think – I know I'm a good teacher, I care about my students, and I can look myself in the mirror every day and like what I see. And that's worth so much more than the completely false attention and adulation this type of person gets in their small, isolated corners of the world.

  3. Patrick  •  Jan 13, 2009 @4:32 pm

    Amy, you might want to read what our friend TJIC has to say on the same subject. His thoughts, as a former student rather than a teacher, resemble your own.

  4. David  •  Jan 13, 2009 @5:41 pm

    Some faculty think it is okay to lecture with notes scribbled on yellow legal pads, that on close inspection, can be seen to have been originally white. They then express dismay that students point up their rigidity and shortcomings in evaluations or via their websites online. My sympathy level for poorly-evaluated teachers is not very high. I know a few excellent teachers who have received poor evaluations unfairly. These have never been the majority, or representative of their overall averages.

    That's about right.

    Folks who oppose merit pay express concern that students will unfairly punish particular teachers despite their merit, and that teachers will unscrupulously water down material in an effort to garner positive feedback.

    From what I've seen, that's generally not what happens. Students generally praise good teachers whether they're easy or hard, and complain about poor teachers likewise. Are there exceptions? Sure. But the marketplace does a reasonably good job of winnowing with customer satisfaction as an index.

    Bringing merit to bear shouldn't induce a teacher to pander; it should induce a teacher to matter.