Ratemyprofessor is notoriously unpredictable. I get good enough ratings, but students say factually untrue things all the time. Like “easy A”–i rarely have more than one or two A’s a class; average probably more like B-/C+. Or, never comments on papers–extensive commenting drafts and final papers, always. So I doubt they were going on that.
And as far as the actual student evaluations the school uses, yes, they tend to reflect likeability more than mastery. A lot of instructors, I’ve heard, feel pressure to give good grades, and/or lighten up classes, if they are given the message that student evals will have hiring/promotion effects.
So he could be a perfectly good teacher, but a tough grader, or humorless, or lots of things that don’t effect teaching quality. We just don’t know.
(And I might add, it can be race, too, though I don’t know that that’s alleged here.)
@VickiSoCal Minor correction: his tenure application didn’t go before the faculty senate. It was voted on by a departmental committee, and then a tenure committee composed of professors from multiple departments.
After that, it went to the president, who denied tenure, and the trustees, who concurred with her decision.
Who’s right? Who knows. The professor’s view is that the president should rubber-stamp the tenure committee’s decisions, but - though you can see why he’d like that - there’s a reason she’s involved in the process. Whether the president’s decision was right or wrong, he’s burned all bridges now - if given tenure after this, or even special accommodations while he looks for a new post, he’ll inspire new troublemakers.
I think poor teachers show up everywhere, in numbers great or small depending on the college.
My husband is a professor and each semester we’re amazed that there is always a few students who accuse him of something, like being disorganized, while equal numbers will detail how thorough and organized he is (sometimes too organized in their opinion). Or some will say he is really funny and others complain about how serious he is. All in the same class. Each semester… It totally frustrates him since he has no idea how to respond and from what we can tell, these kind of ratings aren’t unusual. So to some degree these ratings should be taken with a grain of salt, especially if there are very few of them, unless you see a real trend year after year…
If it was a research I university, a Prof with a great research/publication record…especially those who can draw in huge research grants can get away with mediocre/poor teaching come evaluation/promotion time. Heard of some examples from HS alums/friends who attended such institutions for undergrad and had a few examples for courses I sat in on/audited during summers during/after undergrad.
However, one can’t get away with this nearly as much with teaching centered institutions such as teaching centered universities or LACs.
With teaching centered institutions, f your teaching evaluations are mediocre…you’re not only unlikely to get tenure…sometimes you may not even be hired in the first place as was the case of a few prospective Profs being evaluated by a hiring committee which included a couple of student representatives.
One whom I knew from a few classes said there were a few candidates they all unanimously agreed were such poor teachers in the classroom that they shouldn’t hire them at all…or felt a candidate’s demonstrated attitude towards teaching undergrads meant he/she was better suited for a research I institution rather than LACs like ours.
Not only ratemyprofessor, but other student evaluation websites/evaluations as well.
One evaluation of a Prof at an elite U accused a Prof of not being understandable “having a strong foreign accent”. Interesting as I’ve actually met her in person and know for a fact she doesn’t have a foreign accent of any kind which makes sense considering she’s an American born and raised in the US like most native-born Americans.
Makes one wonder…especially considering the only factor which could have prompted such a post was that she was Asian-American and thus “looked foreign” to the student who wrote that erroneous evaluation on the Us internal Prof/course evaluation site.
Ideally concerns about teaching would be documented in the assistant professor’s pre-tenure performance reviews.
Professors can go on to get decent jobs after a tenure denial but not if they act all goofy like this guy.
Ratemyprofessors is an interesting site. I tend to think that if you ever see comments like, “Attendance is important and you need to read the book,” they might be written by the professors themselves as a way to influence who enrolls in the course…
Hunger strike? Wow. If I went on a hunger strike because i wanted to protest not getting a raise or not getting guaranteed permanent employment for the rest of my career in that field, I would not only get fired, but I would end up burning so many bridges that it would make it really hard to get another job elsewhere in that same field.
But, like Forrest Gump says, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
It may be just me, but I always found it odd that Profs feel the need to place statements like that on course syllabi/state it in first day of class or that students need to be reminded of this fact.
I’ve always been of the view that one should assume this until the Prof/course states/demonstrates otherwise.
Ratemyprofessor has to be taken with a grain of salt of course. Over the year I have learned to read it better. Generally I look for a professor with high level of difficulty yet still with decent overall quality. Students complaining for difficulty but still praises for personality and/or skill. I have reviewed hundreds of them while helping DD to select her professors. She was lucky because we have 6 community colleges within driving distance (3 within 20 minutes), so she had a lot of choices.
I look for comments like;
“So helpful … so hard, Final from chapt 1-20 again, everything in.”
“great teacher…very demanding in her work load”
“Extremely talented and helpful. She is a bit demanding … My longest assignment easily took over 20+ hours”
because they indicate that the students will learn a lot, while being properly supported. This particular professor also grade very harshly (15% A for an art class), yet has high rating.
Or someone with “accent” and hard but still helpful like this professor, because no one is perfect;
“He is the worst chemistry teacher I have ever had. The final exam was so hard.”
"I personally didn’t do as well as I would have wanted, but he is fair. "
“Hard for me to understand his accent … Really helpful … problems are very tricky so you need to understand everything”
“nice professor. His tests are difficult … People are rude to him because he has an accent … you can learn a lot from him.”
“He makes learning chemistry interesting”
“The worst professor ive ever had … Despite his genuine desire to help you … The tests…Ridiculous”
“Chemistry is one of the hardest courses I have taken, but professor is a really great instructor. He takes the time to explain every step”
I felt confident that D would learn well from this professor, and work hard. Understood that she might not ace it, but that was a small price for learning Chemistry well.
On the other hand, remark for the OP professor like;
“won’t even post the homework until the night before it is due.”
“easy grader but his assignments are stupid.”
is someone I would not risk taking.
Had a few friends rave about the quality of a history Prof they had at a Boston area university 20-30 years ago despite being notorious for rarely giving out As or even B+s.
It wasn’t unusual for B to be the highest grade offered in the class…and only offered to the top 1-2 students out of 30-50 in each section.
So true. But nowadays it is unusual to give less than 25~30 A’s at least. Some even give 50%+ A’s. MyEdu data indicated that she was the only art professor who gives ~15% A’s in the entire school district. We seriously considered dropping the course, because it was D’s first college course and she was overworking with 30+ hours per week for that course’s assignment. Still, she seemed the best beginning drawing teacher my D could have, and D loved it.
RateMyProfessor reviews say more about the students who write them than the professor. Most students who respond on the site either hate or love the professor. The vast neutrals don’t bother to write reviews. It’s like Tripadvisor. You’re not going to write a review unless you really liked or disliked a hotel or restaurant. Students like professors who make them feel good, not necessarily the most effective or challenging.
RateMyProfessor is irrelevant to continuance and tenure reviews anyway. For those, the in-house student surveys (usually designed by companies like the College Board) are used. Every student is supposed to fill one out, so you get a more realistic picture of how the professor is perceived by the students.
I didn’t think it was legal to disclose any details about a person whose tenure is denied. At my university, the administration keeps mum on tenure denial cases.
In this case, the professor invited the disclosure by first disclosing his version of the details to the media. I believe that warranted the school’s right to response publicly.
At what other job would the employees all band together and decide that they were granting permanent jobs to each other, and their employer would have to accept this plan? There has to be a process where the the employers are involved, where they have a say in who is hired, promoted, retained. Tenure wasn’t invented to give mediocre teachers permanent employment, but to guarantee professors the right to publish their ideas, to present radical ideas without fear of repercussion.
I’d sure like a job where I could gather 7 or 8 of my co-workers and we’d all vote each other tenure. We could agree to keep other employees out, maybe even other workers who might be better than us. We could decide if someone else needed tenure without regard to whether the employer needed another worker or could afford another worker. It wouldn’t really matter if our customers were happy with our performance because performance reviews wouldn’t be considered.
There is a process and it includes approval at the department level, usually at the dean of the college level or chancellor level, and for the big university whose case I worked on, at the President’s level. Each level has its own standards and really no level had a bigger influence than the others.
This guy had the votes of 6 other Spanish teachers. So what? The university isn’t run by 6 Spanish professors.
FYI, the professor also had the 6-1 vote of the college-wide promotion committee. It was not just the fellow department members. Seeing this, unless there really is something perfectly awful about this professor that hasn’t been publicized, then the university president needs also to improve the process below this final decision. What went wrong to get this tenure candidate that far in the process with such overwhelming support? It may be feasible to dump one candidate for tenure this way, but it can’t be an ongoing thing. If the process is flawed, then it has to be fixed and THAT is tough at a college that has a governance structure that simply is not comparable to the private sector.