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Monday, January 15, 2007
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Evenings With Mr UD Course evaluation forms seem to bring out the worst in everyone. Students fill them out indifferently, or don't submit them at all. Departments, conscious that no one likes them, tinker with them, setting up committees that usually produce longer ones, ensuring even lower participation rates. In-class forms also tend to evolve ever more convoluted and demeaning mandates -- Professors must not give them on the last day of class; they can only give them on the first day of the penultimate week of Whitsuntide... They can't go out at the beginning of the class session... They can't go out at the end of the class session... There's a second evaluation form that has to be handed out, from another academic unit with slightly different interests... Students may only fill the second form out on the eve of the Russian Orthodox Theophany... The overuse of these forms -- mandating that every professor distribute them in class for every class; making them a big part of hiring and promotion decisions -- encourages grade inflation on the part of professors who know that giving a student an A means getting a great evaluation in return. The latest absurdity to which universities have been drawn in their determination to make students who don't want to fill out a form fill out a form is the Money Competition. Students are pitted against one another; the student group (undergrads, grad students) with the highest response rate gets, say, five thousand dollars to use on programming stuff. ... UD sat down with Mr UD, owls hooting in the background, and talked about this whole thing. "You've got what we in the business call a 'collective action' problem," he said. "These forms are only useful if very high numbers of students fill them out -- ideally, you want one hundred percent participation if you want to yield anything real. Yet there's absolutely no incentive for any one student to fill out a form. Their responses are not going to make any difference to their own lives. They don't see any result from their filling the things out, so they don't bother. They're only one person, after all." "Hm. If the problem is that students don't see any tangible result of their efforts, why not stage a public execution of the faculty member who gets the worst evaluations each year?" "That's no incentive. That's only one faculty member. And some students will be so horrified that they'll artificially inflate their evaluations in order to save lives." "But bribing students to fill them out, the way Harvard's doing... Playing to competition among the 'houses' at Harvard...Won't that tend to degrade the value of the form? Students will be motivated by a desire to beat another house, and to make money, which suggests they won't be giving the actual business of thinking about someone's teaching very much thought... And what happens when you decide, maybe, to stop bribing them? After awhile, you've accustomed students, like Pavlov's dog, to linking course evaluation forms with possible bundles of cash... Take that away, and your response rate will crash..." "All of that might be so; but short of outright coercion -- forcing students to fill out an online evaluation form before they can see their grades for the semester, say -- I don't see much beyond bribery that's going to get you anywhere... Not that I think the bribery approach will work all that well..." |