So begins an article in what has become one of the truthiest sources of news on the web. But it is no longer time for mid-semester evals. In most of the US classes are wrapping up, and professors are chest-deep in grading. And the students–the students are also grading.

Few faculty are great fans of student evaluations, and I think with good reason. Even the best designed instruments–and few are well designed–treat the course like a marketing survey. How did you feel about the textbook that was chosen? Were the tests too hard? And tell us, were you entertained?

Were the student evals used for marketing, that would probably be OK. At a couple of the universities where I taught, evals were made publicly available, allowing students a glimpse of what to expect from a course or a professor. While that has its own problems, it’s not a bad use of the practice. It can also be helpful for a professor who is student-centered (and that should be all of us) and wants to consider this response when redesigning the course. I certainly have benefited from evaluations in that way.

Their primary importance on the university campus, however, is as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Often, they are used as the main measure of such effectiveness. Especially for tenure, and now as many universities incorporate more rigorous post-tenure evaluation, there as well.

Teaching to the Test

A former colleague, who shall remain nameless, noted that priming the student evals was actually pretty easily done, and started with the syllabus. You note why your text choice is appropriate, how you are making sure grading is fair, indicate the methods you use to be well organized and speak clearly, etc. Throughout the semester, you keep using the terms used on the evals to make clear how outstanding a professor you really are. While not all the students may fall for this, a good proportion would, he surmised.

(Yes, this faculty member had ridiculously good teaching evaluations. But from what I knew, he was also an outstanding teacher.)

Or you could just change your wardrobe. Or do one of a dozen other things the literature suggests improves student evaluations.

Or you could do what my car dealership does and prominently note that you are going to be surveyed and if you can’t answer “Excellent” to any item, to please bring it to their attention so they can get to excellent. This verges on slimy, and I can imagine, in the final third of the semester, that if I said this it might even cross over into unethical. Of course, if I do the same for students–give them an opportunity to get to the A–it is called mastery learning, and can actually be a pretty effective use of formative assessment.

Or you could do what an Amazon seller has recently done for me, and offer students $10 to remove any negative evaluations. But I think the clearly crosses the line both in Amazon’s case and in the classroom. (That said, I have on one occasion had students fill out evals in a bar after buying them a pitcher of beer.)

It is perhaps a testament to the general character of the professoriate that in an environment where student evaluations have come to be disproportionately influential on our careers, such manipulation–if it occurs at all–is extremely rare.

It’s the nature of the beast, though: we focus on what is measured. If what is being measured is student attitudes toward the course and the professor, we will naturally focus on those attitudes. While such attitudes are related to the ability to learn new material, they are not equivalent.

Doctor Feelgood

Imagine a hospital that promoted doctors (or dismissed them) based largely on patient reviews. Some of you may be saying “that would be awesome.” Given the way many doctors relate to patients, I am right there with you. My current doctor, Ernest Young, actually takes time to talk to me, listens to me, and seems to care about my health, which makes me want to care about my health too. So, good. And frankly, I do think that student (and patient) evaluation serves an important role.

But–and mind you I really have no idea how hospitals evaluate their staff–I suspect there are other metrics involved. Probably some metrics we would prefer were not (how many patients the doctor sees in an hour) and some that we are happy about (how many patients manage to stay alive). As I type this, I strongly suspect that hospitals are not making use of these outcome measures, but I would be pleased to hear otherwise.

A hospital that promoted only doctors who made patients think they were doing better, and who made important medical decisions for them, and who fed them drugs on demand would be a not-so-great place to go to get well. Likewise, a university that promotes faculty who inflate grades, reduce workload to nill, and focus on entertainment to the exclusion of learning would also be a pretty bad place to spend four years.

If we are talking about teaching effectiveness, we should measure outcomes: do students walk out of the classroom knowing much more than they did when they walked in? And we may also want to measure performance: are professors following practices that we know promote learning? The worst people to determine these things: the legislature. The second worst: the students. The third worst: fellow faculty.

Faculty should have their students evaluated by someone else. They should have their teaching performance peer reviewed–and not just by their departmental colleagues. And yes, well designed student evaluations could remain a part of this picture, but they shouldn’t be the whole things.

Buffet Evals

I would guess that 95% of my courses are in the top half on average evals, and that a slightly smaller percentage are in the top quarter. (At SUNY Buffalo, our means were reported against department, school, and university means, as well as weighted against our average grade in the course. Not the case at Quinnipiac.) So, my student evals tend not to suck, but there are also faculty who much more consistently get top marks. In some cases, this is because they are young, charming, and cool–three things I emphatically am not. But in many cases it is because they really care about teaching.

These are the people who need to lead reform of the use of teaching evaluation use in tenure and promotion. It’s true, a lot of them probably like reading their own reviews, and probably agree with their students that they do, indeed, rock. But a fair number I’ve talked to recognize that these evals are given far more weight than they deserve. Right now, the most vocal opponents to student evaluations are those who are–both fairly and unfairly–consistently savaged by their students at the end of the semester.

We need those who have heart-stoppingly perfect evaluations to stand up and say that we need to not pay so much attention to evaluations. I’m not going to hold my breath on that one.

Short of this, we need to create systems of evaluating teaching that are at least reasonably easy and can begin to crowd out the student eval as the sole quantitative measure of teaching effectiveness.

Earlier this week, in the context of discussing what the traditional university provided that crowdsourced and open options did not with my students, I got an interesting mix of the usual suspects and some answers that I hadn’t heard framed in exactly that way before. (And yes, I am always impressed when students are thoughtful about complex issues.) Here are some of the reasons to go to college despite the increased availability of alternatives:

Credentialing

This is no surprise, of course. One of the reasons to go to an accredited university is for the transcript and the diploma. Long after other structures do learning better (if, indeed, such structures or institutions emerge), the university will maintain a stranglehold on students because of its ability to print educational currency in the form of a transcript. For me, this serves as a good reason to loosen that grip.

When MIT jumps on the badge bandwagon and people start talking about Thrun credits, we might argue that this imperative has already been diminished. But does a MOOC that is not a Stanford course hold the same kind of value? I doubt it. Personal brads do matter: that’s why Howard Rheingold and Edward Tufte, among others, can draw paying students to their seminars. But I wonder how far their letters of completion or endorsement carry.

For the time being, if you want to brand yourself as a graduate, you have to go to a university. And completely regardless of the quality of the instruction at that university, the name must be recognized and valued.

Structure

A university tells you what you should be doing, and not just in the classroom. One of my students was open about the fact that if she didn’t have to go to class she wouldn’t: the university in some sense provides a structure of discipline. (Another student disagreed, saying she would get bored without being able to go to class, and was motivated to attend on her own.) This extended beyond the classroom, though, to “life skills.” For many people this is when they are becoming independent, both living on their own and becoming their own thinkers.

Now, I worry that in some places, universities do a poor job of this, extending adolescence well beyond what might be ideal. Many of our students are too scaffolded, and unwilling or unable to put themselves in the driver’s seat of their own learning career. But it was an interesting suggestion: the university provides a needed structure for learning, and frees the student from some of the “meta”: what’s important? when should I study? what are we doing in class today?

Expertise Curation

I thought one of the more interesting answers was that it was hard to find the right people to teach the right things. Yes, there were a lot of self-styled experts out there, but when you don’t know anything about a field, the university provides a faculty that is presumably made up of people who know what they are doing. Perhaps because I’m not as confident in the ways in which universities filter people, this was never one of my top picks for the reason universities exist, but it is an interesting one. For open alternatives to thrive, they need to present a compelling case that they are providing access to experts, and that can be a difficult thing to do.

In some ways, I’m interested in the model of the European Graduate School, which boasts a star-studded faculty. Where else do you find Derrida and John Waters in the same list? Or Peter Greenaway and Donna Haraway? But it is an interesting question: how do you distinguish expertise when you don’t know anything about a field? You don’t. You leave it up to an institution that can act as a filter, and you trust that they hire the cream of the crop.

Guaranteed Skepticism

As an institution, skepticism is built-in. One of the students noted that faculty are willing to expand the conversation by taking positions they may not agree with, by raising questions, by placing skepticism and inquiry in an exalted position. Now, I am sure there are other institutions that do this, but it was heartening to hear this from students: one of the values of the university is a professoriate that is not married to the status quo, that takes nothing for granted, and that encourages a community of inquiry.

Virtuous Community

Because you are–in many cases–sharing the same physical space and bound together in a community, there is some feeling that you are expected to serve other students. Showing up to class unprepared isn’t just a personal failure, but in some way a letting down others in the community. Of course, you can get virtual communities where similar social capital is built, but it is much harder to achieve in the one-off networked class, where dropping the ball (or the course) might have very little effect on other parts of your life. The investment of time in an undergraduate degree means that you are all in the same boat.

Alt-U

I’m a fan of efforts like P2PU. But I also am not quite ready to give up on the university. I don’t think our only choices are the university as it is today or no universities at all. In fact, those two may be exactly the same thing: the university that does not rapidly change to fit the new environment is likely to be buried by the forces of history. As I’ve said before, we are about to go through a sea change in the way universities work that will make the newspaper shakeup seem tame by comparison. The mountain of student loan debt (some of which I continue to carry) constitutes an educational bubble. When universities find themselves having to contract, the outmoded tenure system will make that difficult.

But I also think that this will force some universities to rapidly innovate their way away from failure. It will be a painful process, but part of that process is figuring out what the real value and strengths of a university are. I think relying on the current hold on the credential is a very short-sighted approach.

In the medium term, one of the best solutions is the liberal arts college / research university hybrid. I also suspect that a successful model exists in universities and university towns merging. The walls of the university are coming down, and with them the distinction between student and faculty and worker. I suspect one model of the future university feels a bit more like a small town with a really good library and really good schools, and the four-year program leading to a slip of paper will slowly fade away.

After too many years at this job (I am in my mid-40s), I have grown to question higher education in ways that cannot be rectified by a new syllabus, or a sabbatical, or, heaven forbid, a conference roundtable. No, my troubles with this treasured profession are both broad and deep, and they begin with a fervent belief that most of todayâ€s college students, especially those that come to college straight from high school, are unnecessarily coddled. Professors and administrators seek to “nurture” and “engage” and they are doing so at the expense of teaching. The result: a discernable [sic] and precipitous decline in the quality of college students. More of them come to campus with dreadful study habits. Too few of them read for pleasure. Too many drink and smoke excessively. They are terribly ill-prepared for four years of hard work, and most dangerously, they do not think that college should be arduous. Instead they perceive college as an overnight recreation center in which they exercise, eat, and in between playing extracurricular sports, they carry books around. If a professor is lucky, the books are being skimmed hours before class.

I’m of two minds on the piece. Most of his critique is right on. And naturally, I think he is right that professors need to take responsibility for a good deal of this. But there is enough blame to go around.

As demonstrated over on Open Education (a great blog, by the way), colleges seem to be doing a pretty poor job of graduating students. So even with the anonymous “Mr. Smith’s” criticism that college has effectively been dumbed down, students still don’t manage to graduate. And I will be the first to note that at UB we graduated people who were functionally illiterate. The case may not be as extreme here at QU, but I have had graduate students–some of whom did their undergraduate work here–who said that they had never been required to write a research paper as an undergrad. That’s both scary and sad.

As I was leaving my offices last week, a freshman advisee came in to visit a colleague, and noted that she had blown off a meeting earlier in the day because she was too tired from partying on Thursday night. I was flabbergasted, but I’m not sure why. The six people scheduled to come in for advising on Friday before noon had been no shows.

It becomes a race to the bottom. Anyone who considers themselves a good teacher wants all of their students to succeed, but it is frustrating to have to teach things you expect to have been learned in high school in graduate seminars. It’s bad enough that for many students the high school experience is social rather than academic, now a bachelors degree consists of doing the bare minimum, just to get by. And communication programs have the unfortunate reputation (“football major”), of being less rigorous than many other programs, a reputation that is too often well-earned.

I see this reflected in my own syllabi. If I look at a syllabus from a decade ago, when I first started designing my own undergraduate courses, and compare that with something like the syllabus I just posted the differences are stark. Admittedly, this would be comparing senior level courses to freshman, but even leaving that aside, my expectations have plummeted. I am shocked to hear from students that I was their “hardest” professor, especially after I feel like my courses consist of a pretty light workload.

As “Smith” notes, there are a lot of reasons for this. The university seems to be most interested in keeping up the student-to-faculty ratio, and growing admissions. “Quality” in admissions, is always something to put off until we can afford to be more selective. Considering we accept nearly half our applicants (as opposed to the college down the road, with a 10% admit rate), and more than 70% of those graduate, I’m not entirely surprised at the mediocrity. Can you imagine what sort of improvement in the overall educational experience would occur if my university decided to shrink, accepting an incoming class of 650, rather than 1300? That would put our admit rate at lower than down the road in the other direction, as well as lower than places like Tufts and Barnard. Now, realistically, it would also make us a much tinier college, and given that most of our operating expenses come right out of tuition, it would mean we would have to also cut our expenses by 50%, which would be pretty much impossible (though killing off our intercollegiate sports programs would cushion that a bit).

Once students are admitted, we need to keep them happy so that they don’t either drop out or transfer. Many believe that this is a problem that is restricted to private institutions, and particularly with regard to Ivy League schools, you hear a lot about the difficulty in dropping out. If you have a pulse, you’ll graduate, probably with a B average. But even in public institution, funding is tied to how many students you can retain and teach.

Smith says “enough,” and is moving out of higher ed. I am not willing to give up on it, so how do we fix it?

1. Track especially talented students. I think a lot of universities have picked up on this idea, since it is helps with “selling” the university as well. It can be a hard sell: as a student do you want to be a big fish in a small pond? But from the faculty side, encouraging these kinds of “cadre” programs makes a lot of sense. Many of them are pretty weak programs, and I would like to see them cultivate high school students directly, and prepare teachers to challenge these especially able students, but at least it’s a good start.

2. Be the mean guy. I’ve played the heavy in most of my programs, taking on the first class and treating it as a “cut” class. Unfortunately, that’s no fun for anyone involved. I don’t like failing people, and it’s bad for the cohort. Too much stress is as damaging as too little. Even better, convince the whole faculty to grade more rigorously (good luck!).

3. Use student learning to assess faculty performance. Teaching evaluations are, perhaps, the stupidest waste of time ever. Sure, there are insights that can be gleaned by the professor who wants to improve his teaching, but too often these are just popularity surveys; we find out who the students like, but not who provides the best learning environment. A lot of learning is difficult to measure, but we need something other than student evals to do it.

4. Resist treating education like a business. I think faculties need to stand up to their administrators, and demand quality over quantity. University administration is going to be looking at the dollars: how much does it cost to educate a student. They see more ROI in investing in things like pretty buildings and sports stadiums than they do in the “softer” form of student achievement. We need to focus on ways of selling student achievement and making it more visible, and use that visibility to argue against the commodification of student experience, and the numbers game. Students are not hamburgers, and we should not be judged on how cheaply we can assemble them and pop them out.

Finally, I want to stress that I disagree with “Smith,” on the issue of fun. I think a demanding educational program can still be fun. I think there is a place for a nurturing learning community, and that teaching is more about figuring out how to get (trick!) students to learn than it is about instilling knowledge. The most interesting, exciting, and rewarding things in life are also the most challenging. There has to be some give and take, and if you can show students why you are passionate about learning, some of them will become equally passionate. If you concentrate on grades, they will too. Try to keep them on their toes.