So I ran through everyone in my department on the "other" site. I'm near the top. wtf? So then I read every comment for everyone in my entire department as well as the two we work with most closely. Forget everything we've ever discussed about how to get good reviews. This is all there is to it:
1. Don't "have an accent". I put that in quotes because I know for a fact that mine is terrible. I get mocked at conferences. It's just that apparently these dimwits can't pick it out because it's the same as theirs.
2. Pretend to like them. I'm the meanest psycho I know. I think I have Asperger's syndrome or something. Every semester I think "Jesus Christ, just when I thought people couldn't get any dumber...". But they all think I'm nice. I don't put much effort into the show, but they think they're great, so if I just sing the Hokey Pokey in my head to drown out the dumb things they say, instead of showing anything that contradicts their self assessment, they take it as confirmation of their greatness.
3. Be a bad grader. I have a deep dark secret that parallels the one a lot of us confessed last week... I'm a "softee". But I'm a fake softee. I think they're idiots. But I run a risk-benefit kind of calculation at the end of the term when I look at the final column in the grade book. Then I add a calculated number of points (usually 3/100) to the entire book. The idea is to bump as many of your Most Likely To Complain candidates to the next grade as you can without putting too many A-s over into the A category (otherwise the real As, who are invariably grade grubbers, figure it out and they make more noise than the original batch you were trying to avoid). Then IF any of them do, you run the numbers the right way right in front of them and say "Oh, I made a mistake, crap. Well it's a lot of paper work to get that C+ turned into a C, so if you just promise not to tell anyone, I'll leave it."
There, confessions of a mediocre professor who kicks ass on "the other site".
Ok, honestly, I explain things very well, and that is important. But that's where it stops and there's more to this job than that. I'm a mean cranky jack ass who procrastinates on grading and then grades poorly and somehow gets away with it.
I'm with you as far as #1 and #2. For #3, you are a softie. The rest of the paragraph with all your numbers and explanations is BS. You're a softie and that's why you get good evals.
ReplyDeleteWombat, I love how you just fessed up something I do, too...but am ashamed to admit...
ReplyDeleteI don't know why you are worring about Rate My Bullshit, Wombat of the Copier....nobody has to prove that they are a student to comment, and fake professors can be made. It's like "StudentsReview" for the profs, not the colleges. And if you were a real psychopath, the bad students would wind up in your Naked Puzzle Basement, or their cars would mysteriously explode after class.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that "kicking ass" on that other side qualifies as "getting away with it."
ReplyDeleteI generally agree with Strelnikov (well, at least for the first two sentences; there seem to be some pretty high-functioning psychopaths out there, who manage to cause a considerable amount of misery without risking jail time). And I can't remember whether Wombat has tenure (just that Wombat is *not* pregnant, whatever one of her students might think). But, for those of us without tenure (and especially those of us on teaching-intensive appointments), does anybody else suspect that their administrators do, in fact, read The Site That Shall Not Be Named, and may base decisions on it, even if they come up with some other reason to justify those decisions?
ReplyDeleteWhat about potential employers? That thought is enough to make me want to create a few fake, laudatory, students (not that I've done that, mind you, but, while I wouldn't stoop to fiddling with the official student evaluations, which I also think carry too much weight, I'm not sure I see any ethical problems with fiddling with the "unofficial" ones; I'm just not sure I want to lower myself to bother with/about them that much. But I wonder if that's a naive stance).
A friend at church had googled an upcoming speaker who also happened to be a college professor, in order to compile a bio for an introduction, and mentioned running across That Site, and reading the professor's reviews. I think he was surprised when I visibly cringed and said "I hope you didn't look me up while you were at it."
Faking students would be easy, Contingent Cassandra; just change your IP address after writing each review either by writing reviews from different computers or resetting the address on your computer, or have friends write them from their machines. All you need are five or six....thousand.
ReplyDeleteBen, if I say #3 is a reason they rate me high, and then you say you're with me on #1 and #2, but they rate me high because of #3, I'm not quite getting where we disagree. I know the fake grades get me high ratings, hence the inclusion of that factor on my list. I don't know what you're saying. "Softie" means a sucker who buys their stories and/or cares how the grades affect them and gives them nice grades because of it. "Fake softie" means jerk who is too lazy to deal with the whining, so for completely self serving reasons, gives markedly inflated grades. The primary objective to the bullshit grades is to avoid the whining, but a secondary benefit is they think they like me. If they were seperable, what would you pick? They like you and bother you for two months after grades are posted about their grades, or they hate you but leave you the **** alone? You know you'd pick the latter. So the fake grades are for the quiet, not the reflectively inflated ratings.
ReplyDeletePS lol at cassandra, my fat ass and I do not have tenure. ;)
My only problem is when "softies" delude themselves into thinking they aren't soft and then use whatever power they may have to make those who are not "softies" miserable just to maintain the delusion.
ReplyDeleteBeing "soft" is still a standard, which to me is still better than the A's for Everyone! crowd. Sometimes not though.
Oh, and if you're going to fake students pn the verboten site, be sure to insult the other students for being clueless amidst a plethora of misspelled words.
There are some great teachers who are popular. There are some lousy teachers who are popular. Don't read anything into popularity.
ReplyDeleteWoC, I see the distinction you are trying to make with the term "fake softie". Still, I don't like profs giving students higher marks than they know the students deserve. It doesn't matter if the prof wants to be BFF or just avoid the hassle of student complaints. Admittedly, since I work at a place where I don't catch flack for failing students, it's easy for me to take a hard line on this.
ReplyDeleteOh, I get it. You thought I was saying it like it was a good thing. So we agree.
ReplyDeleteAnd Will, femi... if either of you think I think this is "success", you're taking the term "popularity contest" like it's a good thing. Does anyone over 12 take the term "popularity contest" seriously? I thought it was a key-phrase for "bullshit".
Wombat, are you high?
ReplyDeleteNearly every reality TV show promotes the idea that being popular is good and desired. You cannot assume only children think being popular is the ideal. To do so defies empirical evidence to the contrary.
I figured you sort of meant it as a joke, but most of us live in a world where there are many, many people who fail to grasp that popularity is fleeting. Like an enema.
Wombats have very stubby legs. I'm not more than a foot or so off the ground.
ReplyDeleteI'd say that you should use some of your popularity to tighten up standards, but you don't have tenure, and I know all too well what a tricky dynamic that is. God help higher education in America: Peter Sachs did not go too far to call it, "corrupt."
ReplyDeleteI think I should too, though, so no one worry that I'll think you're looking down from ivory towers saying stuff that's easier said than done. Yeah, it's easier said than done, but when I read this blog and see what others go through, I really have to appreciate my situation. The new department chair is in fact a bit of a people pleaser (where "people" applies more to students than to faculty), but he's a pretty nice guy. He might whine at you on the behalf of some 'flake, but he never twists any arms. And the old chair is the new dean, and she's a hard ass (where that only applies to how she treats students) and supports the faculty like crazy. So all the resolution talk last week got me jazzed to try to be less "popular" this semester. I appreciate the tentative kindness with which that was suggested.
ReplyDelete@Wombat: pictures of mother-and-baby wombat pairs apparently work pretty well as mnemonic devices for me (even if the message is that there is *not* a little wombat on the way).
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, I think tenure *does* play a role in how far any one of us should reasonably go to establish/maintain standards. I'm very grateful to tenured colleagues who do maintain standards, and are willing to speak up for non-tenured types who do the same, regardless of their official or unofficial ratings. I'm pretty careful to maintain distinctions among students, especially in the B+ and above range, and I don't assign passing grades to students I genuinely don't feel have mastered the basic skills covered by the course, but my whole grading scale has probably slid up by an increment (e.g. B- to B) over the course of the last decade or so. Some of that is because I've identified more clearly what I want students to be able to do, and have figured out how to teach it more effectively, but some of it is also the result of my adjusting my average grade (a B) to what most students are willing to accept. Since that's in keeping with the norms at my institution, and I'm very much a cog in the machine, I can live with that; if I had tenure, I'd probably be among those (relatively few) of my colleagues who are trying to push the median downward.
ReplyDeleteThat's right! And now I have tenure, and I USE IT!
ReplyDeleteRRRAAAAAAUUUUUGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Silverbacks are noted for their ability to rip someone's arm off and beat him over the head with it. It's great to be silverback, and I always look after my own troop.
Before I had tenure, I had to be careful never to offend anyone, God forbid. I even said "change over time," instead of "evolution," and of course I never flunked anyone who took the final exam and turned in a term paper.
It was even worse before that, when I was still an Accursed Visiting Assistant Professor. I'm ashamed to think of what I did to stay employed then, particularly since I had a stunningly clueless department chair: he'd yell at me for being too hard, and the very next day muse out loud during a faculty meeting how to improve student quality.
Now, I give As only to the A students, who comprise less than 10% of most classes. Likewise, F students get Fs, D student get Ds, and more than half of most classes get a C or less, because that's what they deserve. Only about half of them bother to show up to class any given day, and I know I'm far more knowledgeable, up-to-date, organized, and (God forbid, but it must be said) entertaining than nearly all the professors from whom I still managed to learn. And I only ever grade on deliverables: and they are shocking, with nonexistent math skills of any kind, no imagination, and chock full of errors I knew not to make in second grade (for example, the difference between "your" and "you're," and the difference between "to," "too," and "two"). Since I got tenure, my students get a much better education, or at least life lessons, if they can't learn anything else.
I can't wait until I get out of this shit-hole so that I can clutch the arm of our most recently tenured faculty member and whisper in his ear "It's silverbacks like you who inflate your grades like mad that fill MY office with whining little shits."
ReplyDeleteohhhhh it's going to be soooooo gooooooood. I may also tell him that I think he's a horrible, horrible man and not "nice" at all, which is how he describes himself.
All of this is idle fantasy. I will simply scutter away to my dark hole with much obsequious bowing.
There are two types of people in the world. Those who want to be popular, and those who pretend they don't.
ReplyDeleteAs for getting good evals, just make them some brownies with a "special" ingredient...yes, that ingredient is love.