Paul wrote:
> I'm not particularly bothered by this site, but like
> Linda Woolf, I don't buy the big assumption in the point
> you're making here: that bad evaluations are necessarily
> the product of a "lack of skill" on the teacher's part.
> I'm pretty well trusted by the students at my institution,
> and they sometimes feel comfortable complaining to me
> about other faculty. Those complaints have been valid at
> times, but they've also been invalid at times. If the
> evaluations were keyed to specific criteria, and the
> students had to provide evidence for their evaluations,
> I'd be a lot more confident in them.
Paul, let me ask you this:
If _all_ your student evaluations were gathered together (not just the
negative or positive ones) and were available to new students, would you
feel that overall they would be positive and that the few invalid ones you
mention would "stand out" as being biased or atypical?
If so, then clearly you wouldn't be harmed by their publication. Students
aren't stupid (well some are, but . . . :), they can recognize sour grapes
as quickly as anyone else. A web site such as the one being discussed will
either contain so little information as to be valueless to students anyway
(in which case it will disappear from disuse), or it will eventually
become an "evaluation bank" where a reasonable sample of evaluations of
faculty members will insure that a reasonably accurate overall picture
emerges. Remember, just as students with a grudge have motivation to post
an evaluation, students who have particularly enjoyed or profited from
your classes have one as well. I have students who call the school to find
out which courses I am teaching in order to take them (one in my Minority
Groups class this term is taking her _fifth_ class from me!); certainly
such students would want to "set the record straight" if I were maligned
online. Obviously I have students who don't like me (one was apparently so
dissatisfied with his grade a couple years ago that s/he trashed the paint
job and windshield on my car with a brick in the faculty lot!) and who
would gladly post a negative evaluation (not just the "he demands _way_
too much work for a 200 level class" type I'm used to, but a "personality
trasher" instead)--but I honestly believe such evaluations would be offset
by the positive ones from other students. If not, then perhaps I need to
re-evaluate my approach to teaching and take those evaluations seriously.
> Of course students have always shared their opinions of
> faculty with each other. The fact that those opinions are
> now on a web site just doesn't seem all that important to me.
> Life goes on. :)
This is key to my original argument. No one would even consider
"monitoring" student conversations in the student union or in a dorm to
prevent them from talking about instructors--and certainly no instructor
would consider sending in students to provide false reports about
instructors so students wouldn't trust each other's statements (the
physical equivalent of posting false evaluations on the web site). If that
was suggested, it would be resoundingly opposed by nearly all academics.
Yet this web site seems to be a "special case" where such actions are at
best considered as "not unreasonable" and at worst are considered
"acceptable." Sorry, but I fail to see any distinction between the
anonymous speech of two students in a student union and the same speech
online.
A _far_ more serious threat to academic integrity coming from the web is
the proliferation of websites where students can exchange term papers and
essays! I subscribed to several of the pay services that provide this
resource in order to "check out" any questionable papers I receive (I've
received two "on-line term papers" in the last year alone!) and have been
astounded by the growth rate of those sites. It isn't much of a reach to
expect that in the near future sites will exist where graduate students
will be compensated for writing papers and undergrads will be able to
purchase those papers at a low cost (an Internet version of the current
"Research Paper" services that advertise in magazines). To me, that's a
_lot_ more serious problem than online evaluations--it makes a complete
mockery of the entire concept of academic integrity and makes it virtually
impossible for faculty members to recognize plagiarism, since they will
have no possible access to the original source.
When that topic came up on TIPS some time ago it wasn't addressed with
anywhere near the opposition or concern that this new website is
receiving--perhaps we all need to reconsider where our priorities should
be--with academic integrity or protecting ourselves from the opinions of
students.
Comments?
Rick
--
Rick Adams
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Department of Social Sciences
Jackson Community College, Jackson, MI
"... and the only measure of your worth and your deeds
will be the love you leave behind when you're gone."
Fred Small, J.D., "Everything Possible"
