Yet another reason why PA is worthless...

College Search & Selection
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<p>You really don’t get it, do you? Look, I’m not going to knock Vanderbilt; it’s a fine school with many talented and accomplished scholars on its faculty, though I would say its faculties as a whole are not as strong as Michigan’s, and most academics would agree. But as for the more general question, yes, I absolutely think it matters. I think one learns history better—and more importantly, perhaps, one acquires a finer appreciation for both the possibilities and limitations of historical scholarship and the range of possible pitfalls with arguments presented as based on historical “fact”—if one spends some time with people actually doing historical research and scholarship at the highest level. And that finer understanding and appreciation of history is an asset whether one works in the law, in government, or wherever. Same with anthropology. Same with any discipline in the humanities or social sciences. </p>

<p>There’s a reason top students from time immemorial have sought out academic quality, understood always to be predicated largely on the quality of an institution’s faculty. It’s why Plato sought out Socrates and studied at his feet. It’s why Aristotle in turn sought out Plato and studied at his feet. I fear US News and some on CC are bent on turning that relationship upside down, defining academic excellence by the SAT scores of the students and the lavishness of the expenditures while pooh-poohing the relevance of any discussion of faculty excellence to an overall evaluation of what an academic institution has to offer. Call me old-fashioned, but I think the faculty still matter, and as I said, I want my D to study with the top people in their respective fields.</p>

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<p>I think your personal insults are uncalled for, hawkette, but that’s not my main concern. I feel compelled to defend my colleagues. Every academic I know—to a person—devotes a great deal of time and energy to teaching, and except in graduate-level-only professional schools (law, medicine, etc.) they devote just as much care and attention to teaching undergraduates as to graduate students. Nor is their research solely for “personal and institutional benefit,” as you so crassly put it. People become academics because of their love for learning, and for the thrill of discovery and the challenge of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. Those who are good at it become renowned academics within their respective disciplines. The fruits of their research are a benefit not only to themselves and their institutions but to the nation and to all of humanity. It is also a direct benefit to their students. That love of learning can be infectious. It can inspire students not only to soar academically as undergraduates, far beyond the pedestrian plodding through a watered-down second-hand rehash of the basics of a field that passes for “education” at far too many places; but it can also inspire in them a lifelong love for learning and develop in them a set of intellectual tools that will let them “learn how to learn”—the most important thing anyone can learn in college. And those are things that will help them in any walk of life. But they are also things that come from first-hand engagement with the outer boundaries of the discipline, not from the watered-down rehash of the basics, however entertainingly that rehash is packaged.</p>

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<p>Ah…Hawkette enters the arena. Welcome wise one, preach on.</p>

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Speaking of Greeks, let’s check out the Classics offerings (after all, it was my major) at Berkeley this semester.</p>

<p>Greek 1 Attic Greek — Taught by a grad student
Greek 40 Prose Composition — Taught by a grad student</p>

<p>Latin 1 Elementary Latin — Taught by grad students
Latin 2 Elementary Latin — Taught by a grad student
Latin 10 Intensive Latin — Taught by a grad student</p>

<p>Now let’s look at Chicago.</p>

<p>Greek 101 Attic Greek — Taught by professors
Greek 111 Accelerated Greek — Taught by a professor
Greek 201 Intermediate Greek — Taught by a professor</p>

<p>Latin 101 Elementary Latin — Taught by a lecturer
Latin 111 Accelerated Latin — Taught by a professor</p>

<p>I don’t think many people would dispute that Berkeley has the best Classics program in the country, yet which university do you think is providing better language instruction? </p>

<p>All the faculty awards in the world can’t waive the fact that Berkeley relies on graduate students to teach students beginning languages in a tiny field that is rapidly shrinking precisely because of poor teaching.</p>

<p>NOTE: My own universities are not exempt. I’m a graduate student at a large research public, and it relies heavily on graduate students, visiting professors, and lecturers. Heck, even my smaller private alma mater did to a degree. While it’s obviously not an ideal state of affairs, I accept it as a practical reality – but I will NOT pretend that many courses are not taught by seasoned faculty.</p>

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<p>Now let’s look at my current community college courses.</p>

<p>Math 226 - Discrete Math - taught by a University of Keele (England) PhD
Math 260 - Calc III - taught by a University of Minnesota PhD
Math 270 - Linear Algebra - taught by a UCLA PhD
Physics 151 - Mechanics - taught by a UCLA PhD</p>

<p>I’m not going to say my school is better than Berkeley now, am I?</p>

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<p>I clicked ready to bash the shizzers out of Pennsylvania. I go to school here and absolutely HATE it (philly is an exception, but my school is smack in the MIDDLE). </p>

<p>Pennsylvania should be cut out from the map. it’s so backwards its silly.</p>

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<p>Bc,
I’m afraid it is you who doesn’t get it. I think you are blinded by your proximity to academia and lack an understanding of the world outside of academia. Your celebration of those in the academic community who do research is understandable and I fully agree that there is much to praise, but knowledge doesn’t originate solely from collegiate faculty. Nor does an interest and ability in research spontaneously translate into effective teaching. </p>

<p>A professor might develop deep knowledge of a subject, but can he/she effectively communicate that knowledge and more importantly, teach others to apply that knowledge in world-changing, genius ways? In my book, it is applied knowledge that matters and I consider this to be the main purview of those outside of the academic world. </p>

<p>IMO the most effective faculty are those who instruct young people into HOW to think, how to attack a problem critically, how to consider a variety of perspectives and how to incorporate those ideas into finding a solution. </p>

<p>The key factor in a great college class is NOT the subject-it is the teacher who has knowledge and can make that knowledge come alive and can engage the student (singular and collective) to stretch and bend and react and consider and grow in ways that the student never expected. The topic could be science or engineering (which is where most of the focus is in these CC debates), but IMO could just as easily be topics like accounting or economics or something obscure like medieval history or…well, just about anything. Teachers who can do this are the folks who inspired me and likely millions of others as well. One might be impressed by the research of a teacher, but IMO his/her words and his/her personal, direct actions will have a far greater, far more valuable and much longer-lasting impact on the student. </p>

<p>And very, very little of this (if any) is captured in the PA score.</p>

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<p>IBClass,</p>

<p>A section of Greek 1 at Berkeley for Fall 2009 is taught by an associate prof who holds a PhD from Oxford. (And the course still has 5 spots available <em>gasp</em>)</p>

<p>It is only the elementary language courses that I’ve heard of being led by a GSI at Berkeley. Even still, the courses are co-instructed by a prof with a PhD from Princeton this semester.</p>

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<p>LOL. You have no idea what I know about “the world outside of academia,” hawkette. I suspect it might surprise you. I’m tempted to respond in kind to your name-calling and personal insults, but I’ll let it go.</p>

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<p>Exactly right. I believe that’s exactly what I said just a few posts ago. And in my experience, the people best equipped to teach these critical thinking and integrative problem-solving skills are typically (and not surprisingly) people who are actually DOING these things, i.e., those engaged in active intellectual work, thinking critically and solving hard problems at the frontiers of human knowledge—“research,” if you will, though I mean that term broadly to include any form of meaningful and sustained scholarly engagement in the discourse and intellectual debates within a field.</p>

<p>True, not every great scholar is a great teacher. And there is some college-level teaching, especially at the elementary levels in many fields, that can be done effectively by people who are not themselves active and capable scholars. But I’m sorry, at the more advanced levels the two really do need to go hand-in-hand. Top undergraduate math students, for example, can be, and need to be, brought along rather quickly to the frontiers of mathematical research; only top-notch mathematicians actively engaged in cutting-edge mathematical research can guide them there. This isn’t something that should need to wait for graduate school. And it’s the same in many, many other disciplines.</p>

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<p>“Top undergraduate math students, for example, can be, and need to be, brought along rather quickly to the frontiers of mathematical research; only top-notch mathematicians actively engaged in cutting-edge mathematical research can guide them there.”</p>

<p>BC: you and UCB keep making our case. My problem with the UC also rans and their high PAs is that they are not attracting “top undergraduate math students.”</p>

<p>Thank you</p>

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<p>bc,
You seem far more convinced than I that these folks are often effective teachers or that highly effective undergraduate teaching (as measured from the consumer’s perspective!!) is actually a priority for top college researchers, but I guess folks can disagree on these perceptions. </p>

<p>Regardless, I hope you will agree that the folks running academia and the research university’s priorities in tenure promotion are the research capabilities/contributions first (and commonly by a large margin) and effective undergraduate teaching second. </p>

<p>And goodness knows that the PA scores have nothing to do with collegiate instruction and the typical undergraduate’s satisfaction with his/her experience in the classroom.</p>

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Hmmm…they did ask this year which colleges exhibit high degree of dedication to undergrad teaching. How long before we see threads from you trumpeting the new survey results like you did the 1995 survey? Or is it because Berkeley and Michigan happen to be included on the new list, you dropped that metric like a hot potato?</p>

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<p>Well, I know there’s a popular mythology about this, but actually, no, I don’t agree—not as a general across-the-board proposition. I think this is something that varies quite considerably from university to university, and within universities it varies from school to school and and discipline to discipline. I’ve been on faculties that care a great deal about teaching and have denied tenure to promising scholars who, based on student evaluations and classroom visits by experienced colleagues, were judged not to be good classroom teachers. I’ve been on other faculties where classroom teaching is a distinctly secondary consideration, if any at all. (And guess what: the one where it was least valued was an Ivy). I do think it’s fair to say that at any major research university, one’s prospects of getting tenure without a very strong portfolio of scholarship are virtually nil. But whether teaching receives equal weight is something that, in my experience, differs a great deal from school to school. </p>

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<p>I would agree that PA scores do not directly measure the quality of classroom instruction. Nothing else in the US News ranking does, either, nor have I yet heard a plausible proposal for how to measure this. The problem I have with scrapping the PA (which I do not think is idealk in its present form, by the way) is that it is the only element in the entire US News ranknig system that has ANYTHING to do with faculty quality on any level. And the idea that a ranking system could have anything useful to say about the quality of a college or university without saying something about the quality of the faculty is to my mind wildly preposterous.</p>

<p>A couple more quick points. The inability to come up with clear measures of teaching effectiveness is a problem that goes well beyond US News. It’s one of the major reasons many people in academia feel they can’t really evaluate teaching in tenure and promotion decisions. Teaching goes on behind closed doors, there are reasons not to place excessive weight on student evaluations, and class visits by colleagues present at best a one-time “snapshot” that may or may not be representative of the teacher’s overall performance. It’s just not “public” in the way scholarship is. I personally don’t think it’s that hard to evaluate teaching in the tenure-and-promotion context; yes, the data is limited, but it can at least weed out the egregious cases. But for inter-university comparisons? I just don’t see it. </p>

<p>As for the “typical undergraduate’s satisfaction with his/her experience in the classroom”—well, that’s something prospective students might want to know for its own sake, but it’s not necessarily an accurate measurement of teaching quality, either. I’ve read enough student evaluations and observed enough of my colleagues in the classroom over the years to know that the teacher with charisma, charm, good looks, and a razor-sharp wit will win out in student evaluations over his more formal or reserved colleague every time—even if what’s being taught by the charmer lacks the depth, heft, subtlety, and nuance of his less charming colleague. Easy graders almost invariably get high marks from students. Individual faculty members who have taught two versions of the same course—one demanding, one dumbed-down—have invariably reported they get higher marks from their students in the dumbed-down version; some have even won tenure after intentionally dumbing down their courses to boost their student evaluations. One study showed an almost perfect correlation between student responses as to how “likeable” they found a professor five minutes into the first lecture, and how they ultimately rated the course in their end-of-semester evaluations—suggesting that student evaluations have less to do with learning that may or may not occur over the course of a semester than with the entertainment value of the experience. So this sort of “student as consumer” data must be taken with a huge grain of salt if we’re trying to get at the effectiveness or quality of the teaching—which may indeed be something many students don’t care all that much about. As a teacher, however, I feel a responsibility to try my best to really teach, not simply to entertain. and as a parent of a soon-to-be college freshman, I’m more interested in schools that will deliver substance, not merely entertainment.</p>