… and what are they paying her for?
Results like this, I guess: Rensselaer Polytechnic University is ranked tenth in the nation for worst professors.
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I’ve been reading through the RPI Rate My Professors pages. The school has quite a few legendarily bad professors – professors known by all, for decades, to be insulting, lazy, incomprehensible.
My favorite comment from among many negative appraisals of professors there:
This professor does not like people or questions.
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To be fair, I doubt President Jackson knows about any of this. Too busy on corporate boards.
December 4th, 2010 at 4:36PM
A lot of universities on that list are heavy into engineering. I still don’t think there’s much correlation between these sorts of evaluations and amount of student learning. The peer-reviewed suggests that also. They might be useful for detecting verbally abusive, or unprepared professors but they are not able to detect ones that dismiss classes early, cancel assignments, grade easily, or entertain at the cost of material coverage. I’ve seen all of that with professors that pass them off as masterful teachers. True evaluation of teaching requires peer review.
December 4th, 2010 at 4:50PM
I’m not sure, Red Stater. Peer reviews, in my experience, tend to produce rather bland results… I think students are far better judges of professors than are other professors. No one watches me as closely, day after day, as my students.
Peer reviewers show up for one or two class days — it’s the students who are there to notice a professor chatting into her cell phone during class; not showing up, or showing up late, consistently; falling asleep during student presentations; showing one film after another; letting grad students teach the class, etc.
I’m not sure of your point on the subject of engineering. There’s certainly no reason it can’t be taught well. It’s not intrinsically dull.
The scandal for me, reading through RPI evaluations, were several professors there with rock-bottom scores — 1.1 all the way across, with thirty or more students scoring them, and with consistent, repeated descriptions of their classroom behavior. These professors have been teaching for decades, and some of them are teaching courses that students in certain majors have to take — there’s no way to avoid the professor. Failure to remove such people from the classroom shows contempt for your student body.
December 4th, 2010 at 8:06PM
I seriously doubt there are 300+ schools with better professors than the ones I had in my undergraduate days at William and Mary. I’d have a lot of skepticism about those rankings.
December 4th, 2010 at 8:13PM
GTWMA: Of course you can’t take these results very far – I agree. In fact, one doesn’t want to make all that much of RMP itself. My point about all of this has always been that it’s useful only when there are really dramatic, well-documented results — when you have forty students, one after another, complaining with very similar details over at least five years about a professor.
And it’s simply very likely to be true that those universities which, in the ranking at issue, show up in the top ten “worst” category, are, at the very least, troubled.
December 4th, 2010 at 9:28PM
I sit on review committees and our College of Engineering professors typically have the lowest evaluation scores. The highest? — College of Ed. (ugh, don’t let me go there) So it didn’t surprise me that universities heavy in engineering were on that list. The other bothersome observation is that some of the lowest rate professors by the students are those from Europe or Asia. Their expectations seem to be higher than Americans. I speak only for the STEM areas. Their scores seem to go up after a few years and it isn’t because they’re teaching more material. I know, I discuss this with them as part of their annual review.
Engineers including those in the education pipeline have the most critical attitudes. That’s perhaps because of the nature of their work (life and death in some cases). The engineers I deal with (I’m not one) are uncompromising and not sympathetic, you either are cut out for the discipline or please move on. The work load on the students is among highest in my university. I sit in on lectures, and judge my colleagues and will write up what I think. I certainly judge them on how well their students are prepared for my classes. I find some of the highest rated professors by the students have the lowest preparedness for my courses. That’s not just my university. This was confirmed by a peer reviewed study just published on student evaluations at the Air Force Academy.
Simply put, in my situation, I would rather have students from monotone professor X’s class with student eval scores of 4/10 than highly entertaining professor Y’s (score = 9.7/10) populating my 4xx class in advanced whatitmycallit.
I read RMP reviews of my colleagues and myself. Sometimes they’re fair. But more often for those critical ones, they don’t have seem to have much semblance to what the professor expects in terms of requisite knowledge and development of critical thinking skills. Demanding professors are often berated. To my highly rated colleagues more than a few are simply nice, or are more entertaining than erudite and when their students get to my classes, they’re overwhelmed with catch-up work. On the other hand, I have a couple that are highly rated and I trust in terms of student preparedness. There’s not a negative correlation, but there’s almost zero correlation. I wish it were positive, then we have the magic formula for measuring teaching success, but we don’t.
December 4th, 2010 at 10:09PM
Absolutely, Red Stater. I hear what you’re saying. There’s a vast category, in RMP, involving genial, amiable, adorable, A’s for everybody, folk. Their ratings are high, but they’re probably pretty worthless teachers.