<p>According to Charles Morse, the director of the USNews ranking survey, the "peer assessment" section included a new question regarding commitment to u/g teaching. Harvard didn't make the cut to be even ranked. Several of our close peers did well, though.</p>
<p>"In the peer assessment category, which contributes 25 percent of a colleges total score, a new question this year attempted to measure colleges commitment to undergraduate teaching by having university officials name schools that they believed exhibited an outstanding commitment specifically to undergraduate education. Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and the University of Maryland Baltimore County were ranked best in this metric among Harvard's peer institutions, but Harvard did not receive the seven necessary votes to be ranked at all, according to Morse."</p>
<p>The results were interesting since many CC users have argued about which schools are really committed to undergraduate teaching. Then again, a lot of people don’t trust US News rankings. Does anyone think Harvard should have been included, even if it wasn’t in the top?</p>
<p>I am completely unclear what “commitment to undergraduate teaching” means. Based on the natural meaning of the words themselves, I would think it would mean that a college took undergraduate teaching evaluations into account in a meaningful way when determining hiring, tenure, and compensation, and that it required a substantial amount of undergraduate teaching out of all faculty members. I don’t know about UMBC, but I would bet anything that there are dozens of institutions with a greater commitment to undergraduate teaching than Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford.</p>
<p>I think the article and headline are misleading. </p>
<p>Specifically, the peer assessment score for Harvard is 4.9 (a top score tied with Princeton, Stanford, and MIT). That score is the result of academics rating a university’s academic programs on a scale of 1-5 (5 being distinguished, 1 being marginal).</p>
<p>Dedication to undergrad teaching was not included in the peer assessment score. That issue was addressed separately, but on the same survey form. Academics were asked to write in some universities on the survey form that had a “strong commitment to undergrad teaching”. The universities listed by USNWR for dedication to undergrad teaching received the most write-in responses. Harvard just wasn’t mentioned enough to make the list…I don’t think that qualifies as a “slam to H’s undergrad teaching”. ;)</p>
<p>Tigger: Of course the quality of the teaching at Harvard has been pretty damn good. My position is that this “commitment to undergraduate teaching” stuff is hooey. There ARE institutions that really see themselves as being in the business of instructing 20-year-olds more than any other thing, but they are NOT the Ivy League or its equivalents, and you wouldn’t send your Harvard (or Dartmouth) student there just because the teachers are so great.</p>
<p>Sure, Dartmouth and Princeton are primarily undergraduate institutions, and I am second to no one in my regard for Yale. But all of them have major aspects of their missions that detract from undergraduate teaching, and rightly so. At each of them, their “commitment” to undergraduate teaching is a lot more rhetorical and cultural than structural and economic. That’s OK with me; I think the resulting balance is fine. (Well, I’m not so sure about Stanford. When my sister was there, the teaching was fine, but the advising was awful, and recent students have reported that . . . it’s still pretty awful. That’s a problem, if it’s true.)</p>
<p>This does seem to be driven by write-in response of administrators at peer institutions. It is impression based. You have to wonder how much this reflects the the “common wisdom” that has been around for decades that Harvard undergrad is an afterthought to the university’s research mission, versus how much it reflects genuine knowledge of Harvard today.</p>
<p>Still, Harvard did commission a large study of its own students and students at 30ish other schools about 5 years ago. Harvard out came something like 30th out of 31 schools in terms of student satisfaction with their experience – not only behind LACs, but also behind almost all of its peers. (Interestingly, though the Boston Globe seems to have had access to a copy, Harvard has never publicly released the results of the study it paid for. Understandable. Why won’t they release it?)</p>
<p>Harvard has, however, taken many steps since to improve things, though.</p>
<p>I can try to find the link, but it has been commented on before on CC so its probably not worth it.</p>
<p>This commitment thing has potential… imagine making up questions like:</p>
<p>"Which would you rather choose to do: </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Teach an undergraduate class of 600 freshmen or take a scenic cruise
on the charles </p></li>
<li><p>Spend time advising your UG students or discussing the latest dessert in
the faculty club</p></li>
<li><p>Discuss your speciality with a graduate student or try to understand why
the UG does not get it</p></li>
<li><p>Focus on the things the tenure com is really concerned about or become
the most popular lecturer and get the coveted 5 on the Q guide</p></li>
<li><p>Help make your lectures mroe interesting or focus on publishing your
research"</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I can totally understand why the college would not have been ranked at the top
on this commitment thingy</p>
<p>Regarding #4 above, tenure cases do take undergraduate teaching into consideration.
I know of one major scholar who was turned down for a tenured appointment despite raves from his graduate students because he did not do enough undergraduate teaching (and probably had little interest in it). In the meantime, a friend of mine was denied tenure at the major LAC where she got raves from the students because she had failed to publish a book by the time she came up.</p>
<p>I had a conversation with Eric Maskin once. He had taught Harvard and MIT for many years, and did not like both places citing too stressful for dealing with students. That was why he escaped to IAS. He liked Yale better for undergraduate education. But, my question is that brilliant students learn by asking questions from people like him, but not by listening to someone who can teach well.</p>
<p>I think you really learn by beng part of a day-to-day community with people who are as smart or smarter than you, some of whom know a lot more than you do, and all of whom are engaged in learning more. Now that includes faculty, and they are the titular gods of the system, and are really responsible for how it functions. But it also includes grad students, other undergraduates, visiting lecturers, etc. In my mind, the advantage of Harvard or Yale over Swarthmore for top students isn’t that there aren’t real benefits from the teaching quality and intimacy at Swarthmore, but that the countervailing benefits of the broader, deeper community at the universities outweigh that.</p>
<p>Perhaps the undergraduate teaching isn’t as highly ranked as you might consider it should be due to undergraduate courses being less strenuous than at some of the comparable universities. For example, my son took an intensive computer science class at Harvard, worked a bit, and ended up with a B+. He then took a similar course at Carnegie Mellon, said it was far more difficult, worked nonstop…and was lucky to end up with a C.</p>
<p>Both classes were in the summer semester, with college students from those specific schools. It was the same subject, but the one at CMU was at a higher level. It was not a retake, both were for credit.</p>
<p>My point is that even though Harvard is an amazing school with a top reputation, is it possible that the undergraduate teaching is rated lower than some other universities because the students don’t have to work as hard to maintain their grades? I’m not saying that killing yourself with schoolwork 16 hours a day with no time for any other activities is desireable. But if other undergraduate departments require a more intense and difficult workload, then that could be the reason for the lower ratings. I’d personally go for the easier workload myself…</p>
<p>I’m not clear what the argument is. The student got a B+ in a comp sci class at Harvard summer school, then took a more advanced class in comp sci at CMU and got a C?</p>
<p>It happens all the time at Harvard, and indeed everywhere else. It’s called getting out of your comfort zone.</p>
<p>Besides, I wouldn’t take a summer course at Harvard as the benchmark for what courses are like, regardless of whether or not it had other Harvard students in it. Harvard summer school programs are a cash cow, and many courses appear to be taught by preceptors, lecturers, or visiting faculty. Now maybe that wasn’t the case with this course, but I can promise that a summer course isn’t going to be representative of a semester course.</p>
<p>Also note that of all the Computer science courses listed for summer school, only one would actually count towards a comp sci concentrators degree credit, Intensive Introduction to Computer Science Using Java. And that counts as CS-50, the first course in computer science.</p>
imagine making up questions like:</p>