This was in the Crampicle of higher Ed, and I have to say, it made me a little queasy. As a friend of mine who works for one of the companies that every ambitious undergrad wants to work for once told me "when we see an undergrad degree in business on a resume, we read that as code for "moron" and throw the thing in the recycle bin." With that in mind, this proffie obviously shouldn't have been surprised to learn that his business students were stupid, rat-fucking, cheaters. On the other hand, he waited seven years to start enforcing any rules against cheating? So maybe business proffies are also rat-fuckers who make it harder on the rest of our sorry asses by being lax and easygoing. On the third hand, NYU uses student evals as a criterion for merit raises???? What kind of sorry-ass third-rate shitbox are they running there? (parenthetically, I know someone who teaches there, and he informs me that to his knowledge none of the departments in the Arts and Sciences use evals for that purpose, so that brings me back to my first point--business students are fucking lame, and so, apparently, are their proffies).
Anyways, without further ado, the flava:
The dean says his faculty members "are never sanctioned in any way" for supporting the school's honor code (i.e., they're not punished for doing their jobs).
ReplyDeleteWhen deans are not very good at telling bad lies in public, it makes you wonder what's actually going on behind closed doors.
Oh yeah, that dean is a piece of work, ain't he? I love how he said that the evals filled out by students with honor violations weren't counted against the professor. Except of course, since the evals are presumably anonymous, how the fuck would he know which ones came from the cheaters. Oh right, because all the students at his business college are cheating fucks...LOL.
ReplyDeleteIf his student evals had a significant effect on his raise (hey! they got raises any time in the recent past?), then something's wrong with their system of determining raises. He's at a university, and tenured, so theoretically he should be doing, and being evaluated on, research, teaching, *and* service. And any decent system of evaluating teaching should have an element of peer review (some combination of class observations, examination of teaching materials, graded work, etc., and review of a narrative by the teacher him/herself). Even if they have some kind of system where individual proffies can tilt the balance a bit more toward one of the three categories, the student evaluations should count for at most 15% of the total, and probably less. Maybe he didn't get any research done because he was too busy doing plagiarism paperwork, but it still seems like something in their system is off.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what would happen if they let any proffie who caught more than a certain percentage of a class -- let's say 10% -- cheating exclude teaching evaluations from that class from his salary review that year? That sounds like it would align everybody's interests (except, of course, for the plagiarists') reasonably well, without giving proffies too much of an incentive to find plagiarism.
But I have to admit that the idea of a story which makes an administrator look bad for relying too much on student evals to evaluate teaching "going viral" makes me happy, in a perverse, sad, sort of way.
ReplyDeleteThe great irony to me is that the prof at the center of this shitstorm is either Greek or of Greek descent; he teaches business but is slipping up with the "cheaterz" - Greece's* bad turns at business just might smash the Euro block entirely. Oh well....a blogger I follow, Richard Seymour (aka Lenin) has made a pretty good case that the Euro-zone was a right wing project which would allow Brussles and London to pull a mini-IMF and ram austerity and "efficiency" down the throats of Euro-zone countries like Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the former Warsaw Pact states as they become integrated into "European capitalism." NATO sells them guns, and the Euro parcels out the butter....what a load of bullocks.
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* I'm not blaming Greece; as it is laid out, it's impossible for the smaller European states to compete against monster economies like Germany or the Scandinavian states....it reminds me of Europe five minutes before WWI; you could expect something to flare up in the Balkans (there had been small wars in the `teens), but not Serb anarchists shooting idiot Hapsburgs setting off the ultimate mousetrap.
I will bow to AA normally, but, from the CM Glossary:
ReplyDeleteFlava
Just a smidgen of the real thing; usually used to refer to a snippet of a linked article.