<p>From Do</a> the Best Professors Get the Worst Ratings? | Psychology Today</p>
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<p>I think this could explain some of my professors. They didn’t teach us anything in the classroom, so we were forced to try and learn everything on our own. Oftentimes we wound up learning all sorts of random things because we didn’t actually know what we were supposed to be learning for the course. Getting the skill to teach yourself at an intro-level class will definitely pay more dividends for the future than learning only the material covered in a class.</p>
<p>Students know what’s good for them. They respect/recognize a teacher who expands their horizons regardless of the grade they receive. I think even high school students know this in their core. However, certainly there are poor teachers/professors who hide behind the notion that they are misunderstood. They believe they have high standards and students deserve low grades. They think they, are somehow, above teaching to a test. They do not have the respect of students.</p>
<p>Arbitrary, disorganized professors who don’t keep track of what they’ve taught and whose exams don’t reflect what they covered/assigned during the semester are not good teachers. Professors who want to be liked and who give everyone high grades are also not good teachers. </p>
<p>It’s true that the most effective teachers won’t necessarily have the highest ratings, because they are demanding, and many students don’t like challenge (even if they claim otherwise). On the other hand, a professor whom everyone hates is probably just a bad professor.</p>
<p>The comparison of fluent vs. “disfluent” presentations on calico cat genetics was based on one-minute videos. Viewers of the video learned equally well from either presentation. (The instructor was the same.)</p>
<p>I don’t think that this comparison tells much about student reactions to a 50-minute lecture. It is not too difficult to maintain attention for a minute, regardless of the quality of the presentation. When it comes to a 50-minute class, that’s different.</p>
<p>Now, it is possible that the “disfluent” version of the instructor would teach closer to the pace of student comprehension, which could make this version actually preferable. Also, it is unclear which version of the instructor is more alert to students’ cues about what they are understanding from the presentation, and what they already know. I don’t think that you can tell in advance which version of the instructor would interact more with the students, ask better questions, or respond to students’ questions better.</p>
<p>What I do see in forum comments is a common aversion to “good but hard” instructors, although the best students and the ones most motivated to learn the material may favor them.</p>
<p>I would say the worst professors get the worst ratings. The worst professor in my college years was presented a bucket of tar and feathers to the wild applause of the whole auditorium (300 plus) at the end of the school year. He was fired after that–the students finally made their point. I’m only sorry it had to get to that point to actually make the complaints about him carry some weight. And he’s lucky we didn’t use the tar. He left the stage before they had a chance. Good old days.</p>
<p>I think it’s a mixed bag. Some professors really are bad teachers, and this doesn’t necessarily correlate with scholarly achievements, knowledge of the field, or longevity. Some professors really are good teachers; this also doesn’t necessarily correlate with scholarly achievement, knowledge, or longevity. Good teachers tend to be popular and get good student evaluations, and bad teachers tend to get bad student evaluations. </p>
<p>I also think some professors are popular without necessarily being good teachers. People in this third category tend to be funny and/or witty, good looking, stylish, glib, good storytellers, charismatic, somewhat theatrical in always putting on a good show, au courant with the popular culture the students are consuming, and young (there’s nothing more pathetic than an old, out-of-touch professor trying to make current pop culture references and misfiring). Someone with those characteristics is going to get good student evaluations pretty much regardless of the course content or how effectively the material is actually taught. They’re entertainers more than teachers, and frankly some students prefer entertainment to learning. </p>
<p>Of course, it’s possible to be both a good entertainer and an effective teacher, and perhaps that’s the best combination; but it’s also possible to be an effective teacher without being a good entertainer, or vice versa. Students don’t always draw those distinctions, and some students tend to reward entertainment value more than teaching.</p>
<p>There’s actually an extensive scholarly literature on this. Studies have found student teaching evaluations tend to reward the physical beauty of the instructor (student evaluations of teaching correlate positively with ratings of physical appearance by independent panels of observers), grade inflation (instructors who give high grades get high marks in return from their students; this is especially true of adjuncts), small classes, entertainment value, and perceived warmth/friendliness of the instructor, while exhibiting biases based on gender (female instructors generally fare worse, but female instructors in traditionally male-dominated fields tend to get even lower evaluations), race (racial minorities generally fare worse; test groups give higher evaluations to the identical lecture if shown a picture of a white person than a picture of a racial minority), and foreign-born status (studies have suggested any trace of a foreign accent, especially Asian, will prompt student complaints that they “can’t understand” the instructor, even if the instructor exhibits English fluency in expert diagnostic tests). Young Asian women with traces of accents tend to fare especially poorly. A famous Harvard study asked students to rate professors based on a 30-second video clip; the results closely correlated with actual student evaluations at the end of a semester-long course of instruction, suggesting the student evaluations may ultimately be more about what is known in the television industry as “Q-rating,” i.e., how appealing is this person’s visual appearance, personality, and demeanor, given all the subjective biases that go into that, rather than the effectiveness of the instruction.</p>
<p>The story linked in the OP raises another troubling possibility: perhaps some truly effective teachers are punished by their students for taking them outside their comfort zone. My guess is this probably does happen occasionally, but probably not a lot. I do think there are a lot of very good teachers who will never win teaching awards because they’re too “hard” and/or unconventional to be popular, but generally these people do well enough on their teaching evaluations, especially in more advanced courses, because they tend to draw students who are comfortable with their teaching style. I’d be more concerned that some genuinely bad teachers would hide behind the category of “too good for the students” to justify their bad teaching evaluations.</p>
<p>Actually, I remember in high school that there were some teachers who were routinely avoided because they were “hard” by high school standards (in a school which, at the time, sent about 1/3 of the class to four year colleges, not 99% like the typical high school discussed on these forums). But “hard” by high school standards was not particularly hard for the better students in the school.</p>
<p>I thought that the second half of the article, focusing on the study of Air Force Academy students, was much more interesting than the first half. The idea that teaching that results in higher performance in the current class may result may create worse results in the long term is fascinating and provocative. I do know that my high school students favor teachers who are explicit about what will be on the test, and that they resent teachers who give tests that require them to apply what they have learned in unanticipated ways. At the same time, I find it believable that the latter (more frustrating) group of teachers promote a deeper understanding of their subject.</p>
<p>Of course what you describe does, Mirabile. I used to counsel/advise students at the college I teach at, and one continual complaint was that they had studied, but what was on the test asked questions differently. and of course that’s the difference between memorizing knowledge and understanding how to use it. Again, this is going back to critical thinking and how crucial it is.</p>
<p>I ran a workshop once for nursing students in an intro course on nursing theory and background ideas. What I realized after a while is that many were failing the test because they lacked the ability to read the questions correctly to know what was being asked. And the questions tended to apply theory rather than ask them to spit back memorized definitions. ONce I got them to see that, and worked through actual questions to understand what the task was, they did much better.</p>
<p>As a college instructor, I teach first-year comp. Which might as well be titled “thinking and arguing clearly.” It’s HARD. My evaluations generally say–love the class but she grades really hard. </p>
<p>Yup. And they rise to it. :)</p>
<p>I view the ratings differently depending on the students likely to be taking the class. Students at MIT like a challenge. So do students at any university who sign up to take Arabic, quantum theory, or combinatorial topology. A low rating in those classes probably doesn’t reflect dissatisfaction with tough material.</p>