Posted on 05/24/2015 3:17:18 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
In what is apparently a vogue of Republican state legislators exercising misplaced vendettas against college professors, Iowa Sen. Mark Chelgren recently made headlines when he introduced Senate File 64, “an Act relating to the teaching effectiveness and employment of professors” at Iowa public institutions.
Each year, the bill stipulates, any faculty who fails “to attain a minimum threshold of performance” based solely on student evaluations would be automatically fired regardless of rank or tenure. Lest you think that firing professors based on a questionable assessment metric affords them too much dignity, rest assured there is more. Some beleaguered governing body would also publish the names of the five professors with the lowest acceptable evaluations, and the student body would then “vote on the question of whether any of the five professors will be retained.”......
.....When, for example, a diner at a restaurant pairs tilapia with zinfandel, and then raises a holy fit about how disgusting her tilapia tastes, the manager has little choice but to restrain the irate sommelier and comp the food, even though it is the customer’s fault the food was “bad.” The staff would not dare suggest the customer try a different wine, because that rude attitude would be yet more fodder for a scathing Yelp review; e.g., “If I could give this place negative stars, I would!”....
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
I was only seeing the issue with tenure, not the rest of it.
Of course, I live in NY state so tenured mediocrity is what I’d see and not notice the rest of the issue at hand.
9Year clued me in that tenure is a separate issue.
Hoo boy..
In conversation off forum, I am told that they have changed how they evaluate performance already here in NY.
I’m not privy to the exact details, but what had been a passing performance mark is now considered failing/poor.
I’ll have to go get it from the horse’s mouth so to speak.
“I say put cameras in the classroom and base evaluations solely on 1) cogency and clarity of each instructor’s lectures and 2) keeping with high and consistent standards, set by the university, in assessments . Problem solved.”
Big Brother, anyone?
Good idea. . .but one has to be aware most of those in college/university leadership positions are leftist and any defense or offering of a conservative opinion or politically incorrect position would be severely discouraged.
Using that as a metric I would never have become a fighter pilot, a Pentagon gunrunner, a strategic and crisis action planner and now, post USAF retirement, a college instructor.
Using SAT/ACT as a defining characteristic when the person being evaluated is young will result in vast numbers of “young” (basically immature) people being pigeonholed unfairly and boxed out from greater challenges and opportunities.
There was a Supreme Court case that banned using testing as a condition of employment. Because racism.
Murray talked about it at length
Hmmm...guess I don’t have as negative a view of student evals as you do. I agree that, often, a majority of students don’t fill them out. Also, those who do often either really like or really hate the class. You can always recognize the latter as they just mark “strongly disagree” for every question. Some of the qualitative comments are interesting to read too. Still, I do find them valuable and they are generally what I expect them to be (but not always).
So, on average, I find them to be “fair”. Still, not everyone agrees with me. A number of my colleagues also have a negative view of student reviews. Where I teach, once you have tenure, student reviews are optional unless you are under evaluation (every 4 years). Still, I do them every semester anyway because I want to see what the students think.
I still say to do accurate evaluations, you need to have an unbiased third party (neither students or peers). However, finding one that is truly “unbiased” may be quite the trick in some disciplines.
Have not read Charles Murray’s essays, but perhaps I will. As a college professor, in the belly-of-the-beast, I tend to form my own opinions.
My best professor was hard as hell, but he turned me into a problem solver. He used to call all his students girls. At that time we only had one female studying engineering. One of the proudest days in my life was when he gave us back an exam, and as he gave me my exam he said in a loud voice ‘You can leave Sir, I don’t want to waste your time while I go over this exam with the girls’. Most students hated him, but he was a great teacher. He would not last long in today’s pc world.
I worry about agreeing with anything published in Slate, but WTF?
My evals are generally very positive but I also have many that are unfair attacks. Thing is, my ‘leadership’ focuses on the odd eval that falls outside the statistical norm and treat that eval as objective truth that indicates an issue to be addressed.
Stir up the hornets nest.
And...Yes,...Charles Murray did talk about the tests industry was using, but they weren't using the SAT or ACT exams. They were using their own tests or recognized IQ tests.
Here is a short essay that Murray published in the Wall Street Journal. It allows sharing with twitter so it must be OK to post here on Free Republic.
^^^^^^^^
For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time
By CHARLES MURRAY
Updated Aug. 13, 2008 12:01 a.m. ET
Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:
First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn’t meet the goal. We will call the goal a “BA.”
You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that’s the system we have in place.
Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.
Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.
The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.
The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough — four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you’re a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school.
The merits of a CPA-like certification exam apply to any college major for which the BA is now used as a job qualification. To name just some of them: criminal justice, social work, public administration and the many separate majors under the headings of business, computer science and education. Such majors accounted for almost two-thirds of the bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2005. For that matter, certification tests can be used for purely academic disciplines. Why not present graduate schools with certifications in microbiology or economics — and who cares if the applicants passed the exam after studying in the local public library?
Certification tests need not undermine the incentives to get a traditional liberal-arts education. If professional and graduate schools want students who have acquired one, all they need do is require certification scores in the appropriate disciplines. Students facing such requirements are likely to get a much better liberal education than even our most elite schools require now.
Certification tests will not get rid of the problems associated with differences in intellectual ability: People with high intellectual ability will still have an edge. Graduates of prestigious colleges will still, on average, have higher certification scores than people who have taken online courses — just because prestigious colleges attract intellectually talented applicants.
But that’s irrelevant to the larger issue. Under a certification system, four years is not required, residence is not required, expensive tuitions are not required, and a degree is not required. Equal educational opportunity means, among other things, creating a society in which it’s what you know that makes the difference. Substituting certifications for degrees would be a big step in that direction.
The incentives are right. Certification tests would provide all employers with valuable, trustworthy information about job applicants. They would benefit young people who cannot or do not want to attend a traditional four-year college. They would be welcomed by the growing post-secondary online educational industry, which cannot offer the halo effect of a BA from a traditional college, but can realistically promise their students good training for a certification test — as good as they are likely to get at a traditional college, for a lot less money and in a lot less time.
Certification tests would disadvantage just one set of people: Students who have gotten into well-known traditional schools, but who are coasting through their years in college and would score poorly on a certification test. Disadvantaging them is an outcome devoutly to be wished.
No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. Hundreds of certification tests already exist, for everything from building code inspectors to advanced medical specialties. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted, like the CPA exam.
No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. Hundreds of certification tests already exist, for everything from building code inspectors to advanced medical specialties. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted, like the CPA exam.
But when so many of the players would benefit, a market opportunity exists. If a high-profile testing company such as the Educational Testing Service were to reach a strategic decision to create definitive certification tests, it could coordinate with major employers, professional groups and nontraditional universities to make its tests the gold standard. A handful of key decisions could produce a tipping effect. Imagine if Microsoft announced it would henceforth require scores on a certain battery of certification tests from all of its programming applicants. Scores on that battery would acquire instant credibility for programming job applicants throughout the industry.
An educational world based on certification tests would be a better place in many ways, but the overarching benefit is that the line between college and noncollege competencies would be blurred. Hardly any jobs would still have the BA as a requirement for a shot at being hired. Opportunities would be wider and fairer, and the stigma of not having a BA would diminish.
Most important in an increasingly class-riven America: The demonstration of competency in business administration or European history would, appropriately, take on similarities to the demonstration of competency in cooking or welding. Our obsession with the BA has created a two-tiered entry to adulthood, anointing some for admission to the club and labeling the rest as second-best.
Here’s the reality: Everyone in every occupation starts as an apprentice. Those who are good enough become journeymen. The best become master craftsmen. This is as true of business executives and history professors as of chefs and welders. Getting rid of the BA and replacing it with evidence of competence — treating post-secondary education as apprenticeships for everyone — is one way to help us to recognize that common bond.
This is the one paragraph that addresses your area.
Question: Would your students be more attentive and hard working if they knew that companies would require a certifying exam in the classes you are teaching?
By the way, I ( personally) learn best in a classroom setting. Not all do but **I** do! I am certain that many students would still attend traditional schools for because it is the best environment for them.
^^^
By Charles Murray ( WSJ essay)
“But when so many of the players would benefit, a market opportunity exists. If a high-profile testing company such as the Educational Testing Service were to reach a strategic decision to create definitive certification tests, it could coordinate with major employers, professional groups and nontraditional universities to make its tests the gold standard. A handful of key decisions could produce a tipping effect. Imagine if Microsoft announced it would henceforth require scores on a certain battery of certification tests from all of its programming applicants. Scores on that battery would acquire instant credibility for programming job applicants throughout the industry.”
Please read post #92.
I posted Murray’s Wall Street Journay essay.
I don’t think a certifying test is a bad idea. Engineers have one to become a professional engineer. But computer science is so broad that you would need a bunch of them. For example, different ones that focuses topics like web programming, computer graphics or computer security.
For many majors, such a test would make no sense. You could have a certifying test in history, but there are very few jobs that specifically require a knowledge of history.
As I said, for computer science grads there is increasing emphasis on what you can show, not just what you know. So being able to show a program you wrote or what you did on an open source software project can be more important than your GPA. Also, most employers will have a guru test you as part of the interview. All of these are positive trends.
No, I haven’t been in the military—and I’m always hearing about how much help our vets need getting jobs when they get out.
I’d also venture to say that I’m in a part of the country and sort of town where a parent would as likely sue the college as celebrate it, were their binky to sign up after graduation.
BTW, I don’t doubt the value of military experience. Also, I’ve had two extended family members in the military in recent decades—one as a JAG and the other as a Seal. Both had all the qualities to advance in the private sector with or without their military experience.
Yep, Duke Power, I believe. Not being able to test for intelligence forced employers to use college degrees as proxies for intelligence, which required people to get college degrees for jobs that didn’t require college degrees—just intelligence.
Yep—a rigorous college-level GED could be very effective. It would have to be very rigorous—almost of a level of the Chartered Financial Analyst exams, but for general (or specialized) math, science, world history, etc. That way it would have real value (as opposed to the dumbed-down GED at the high school level.)
My daughter graduated with a B.S. in mathematics at the age of 18. ( She was homeschooled.) She has made a nice career for herself as a data analyst for an insurance company. He goal is to pass Oracle exams. (Do I have that right? Her work is complete outside anything in my experience.)
Individuals involved in manned space exploration naturally look for larger purposes in order to justify the career choices and personal risks and sacrifices required. The great expense and technical challenges though require more than the romance and ideology of space exploration. Instead, a compelling national interest and a credible business case are needed in order to shake loose the necessary funding.
As it was, without the Cold War to energize a space race, the immense flow of cash necessary for the development of manned space flight would not have materialized. Manned space flight would instead be confined to science fiction and Chesley Bonestell's visionary paintings.
Today, the best hopes for a renewal of American manned space exploration are that cash is flowing again because we are on the cusp of a new space race with China and Russia and there are emerging private business models for profit based on space tourism and resource exploitation.
In addition, new technology now emerging from NASA and other research labs may radically revise the cost equations of manned space flight. See: Evaluating NASA’s Futuristic EM Drive.
If trips around the near regions of the solar system could be accomplished cheaply, safely, and in weeks instead of years, there would quickly be both all the funding needed and mass public interest in and support for space exploration. The associated romance and ideology would gain new currency, with larger consequences for American society in a renewed sense of energy, optimism, and progress.
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