It seems to me that metrics such as faculty to student ratio, public teacher ratings or the college brochures and USNews teaching rankings aren’t really reliable.
Does anybody know of ways to judge overall teaching quality?
What has worked for you?
I’ve attended four colleges and taught at two others. In my experience, at least, I’m not sure there is such a thing as “overall teaching quality.” Even the teaching within a single department can be highly variable, particularly small departments that have high faculty turnover rates (i.e. those heavily dependent on visiting professors).
Sitting in on classes, talking to students and recent alumni, checking ratings on ratemyprofessor.
There are no tried and true ways to evaluate teaching quality, I’m sorry to say.
If you are concerned about teaching quality, many people will recommend smaller colleges, at which professors can put a little more effort into teaching because they don’t have as much pressure to produce research. While that might be a general trend, it is nowhere near absolute; there are still a lot of profs at big universities who are wonderful teachers, and not all profs at small colleges are wonderful teachers.
One thing to be aware of is that at small colleges it’s more likely that there will be only one professor teaching a certain class, and if you need that class you won’t be able to avoid him/her. That’s fine if the prof is good, but if the prof isn’t good there isn’t much you can do about it except perhaps take that course at another college during the summer.
Bottom line is that once you are enrolled at a college it’s pretty easy to find out the various professors’ reputations via Rate My Professor & word of mouth.
Thank you for your comments and suggestions everybody
The Princeton Review does have two teaching ratings, one for teaching quality and one for teacher accessibility (that might not be the exact language, but it is the gist for those two categories). Of course, I have no idea how solid these survey-based ratings are, but for fun you can visit the website, type in any school, and see the scores. Harvard doesn’t do so well. 
USNews’s almost complete lack of consideration for what actually happens in the classroom has always been my biggest complaint. Imagine ranking best restaurants and considering all sorts of criteria except the most important one: is the food any good? It is frustrating that the very reason that one is attending a post-secondary institution (to receive an education) is also the very thing that is difficult to specifically examine. At the same time, getting decent data would be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive (to do it well), as it would have to be survey-based. Thus, it’s much more tempting, and much easier, for US News and others to crunch schools’ common data set info instead.
Do your research. Do your reading. Ask people here if they or their children have direct experience with a given college or university.
@moooop makes good points. I would add that you can get the best of both worlds by attending a college in a consortium. Consortia schools are small colleges (usually) that allow cross registration freely (or fairly freely) at the other schools. This allows students access to other professors if they don’t like the ones at their home school. Transportation is usually part of the deal, but not always.
Consortia include –
Simmons and several other schools in Boston
Bryn Mawr, haverford, Swarthmore and UPenn in Pennsylvania
Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Amherst, Hampshire and UMass Amherst in Western Massachusetts
Pomona, Scripps, Harvey Muddy, Pitzer and Clarmont Mc. in California
The Guilford consortium – https://www.guilford.edu/who-we-are/greater-greensboro-consortium
There are other arrangements such as –
Mills can cross reg at Berkeley
Barnard is part of Columbia U and is across the street
Agnes Scott can cros reg at Emory
Wellesley can cros reg at MIT
etc.
I would also note that if you’re concerned about teaching quality, you may also be curious about how students interact with each other and that atmosphere. Some schools (Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Swarthmore) seem to have fairly competitive student bodies – students who seem to thrive on competing intellectually with each other. Other schools have more laid back or even homey atmospheres that foster collaboration. For laid back a classic example would be Hampshire. For homey the examples that come to mind are Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Mt. Holyoke.
However, when evaluating cross registration arrangements, consider the following:
- How convenient is transportation between the different schools?
- Are academic calendars and final exam schedules synchronized between the different schools?
- Are desired classes at the other schools often full, and is it realistic for cross registration students to get into them if there is barely enough space for the other school's own students?
These are good things to weigh. That’s why it’s important to look at schools that are set up as consortia. Several have anticipated and solved these problems.
The Claremont schools are 5 minute walks from each other
The Bryn Mawr/Haverford pair are extremely well integrated in terms of schedule and transportation, exam schedules and exam philosophies (self-scheduled honor system). Swarthmore is further out but buses are provided. The three schools share activities too. UPenn portion – there’s free train transport provided.
The Five Colleges in Western Mass the consortium works well there though the schools are further apart. There’s a free bus system. I have known graduates from that grouping who have taken classes at all five schools.
This is anecdotal and worth looking at more deeply as you do more research.
While not the total story, class size tells you something about what your educational experience will be like. Once the class is over 40 or so (and some might argue for a lower limit) you’re going to be sitting listening to a lecture rather than engaging in discussion, asking questions and being asked questions by the prof, etc. There are spellbinding lecturers and inept teachers of small classes so you don’t want to overgeneralize.
If you want to know about class size don’t look at faculty to student ratio. Many colleges have their Schedule of Classes online. Set up a sample schedule for your first 2 years of college, then go look up the classes. It would be common, for example, to take an Intro Psych class. You can find what the enrollment is.
I would suggest coupling this with visits to colleges of various sizes in your area. They don’t need to be schools you apply to but you want to see what it is like to be in a college class of 20 kids, of 50 kids, of 250 kids.
Once you start to narrow down your search, you can look at various websites where students review faculty & courses to get another set of opinions. These are sites like Rate My Professors. I don’t think it makes much sense to look at those early on, because they are anecdotal reports and may only reflect opinions about a small proportion of the faculty at any given school – possibly faculty members who won’t even be there by the time the student enrolls.
But when it comes down to making final choices in the spring, it may make a lot of sense to look at those reviews along with course schedules and major requirements for a particular school & major that the student is interested in – to get a sense of what the students think about their profs.
Of course this needs to be taken with a grain of salt — as with any review site – but when there are a lot of reviews with a common theme it can be telling.
But its also worth keeping in mind that class size will have an impact on whether or not courses or professors are reviewed, simply because of the aggregate number of students who are even exposed to a particular course or prof. So it’s quite possible that the profs who teach large, survey-type courses will be reviewed — so again, this resource really needs to be cross-checked carefully against school information. If there are 15 profs in the department and only 2 have reviews – that doesn’t really provide useful info about the faculty as a whole.
Some colleges have their own dedicated review sites — for my daughter, Columbia’s Culpa was incredibly helpful along the way for course selection. It wasn’t a factor for us considered for selecting the college – but I certainly can see the potential value to others, especially when it comes down to making a final choice.