I teach all online at a school that places itself in a SLAC market segment and markets heavily to working adults/career changers in a portion of the school that delivers those courses mostly online and mostly in fantastically accelerated coursed that dish a full semester of work and credit and leave me --and presumably my students-- exhausted ('cause I also got me a daytime gig).
In the online setting, I can't corral the most trustworthy student 15 minutes before the end of a late-in-the-term class collect and deliver course evals. On the Interwebs, it's all up to the students to decide to evaluate the course or not.
My lifetime return rate for online course evaluations prior to this term: about 41%.
This spring, I decided to sweeten the pot (because we REALLY REALLY care and by golly, we use your feedback to improve the course and my teaching methods). I don't ever offer extra credit, but dangled the evaluations as a carrot with the potential to bump their total scores 3% (roughly the equivalent of a weekly discussion participation...which I grade at full credit just for posting almost anything more complex than "LOL").
Three ground rules:
(1) I would not apply the 3% to move a failing grade to a passing grade
(2) 100% of the class had to participate
(3) They had to take me at my word, but I would prove it with a screenshot, since we see participation rates before we see the contents..
This term's evaluation return rate:
41%.
In the words of Liz Lemon: WTW?
In my own words: why do I bother?
Somewhere, there's a scholar of game theory who can explain this. But my amateur analysis would be that the snowflakes have little to no sense of community or collective responsibility (and/or no trust in each others' sense of community or collective responsibility).
ReplyDeleteAs for why you (keep) bother(ing) -- an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, perhaps? Or the importance your institution places on evaluations in making decisions that you do care about? If the latter, at least you can show them you tried.
^++ 3% boost per would have increased your rate of return. By requiring all students to participate, and stipulating that it won't help the failing ones, you have removed any actual incentive from those who know/believe/fear they are failing. They must participate solely for the good of their comrades. And how many of the failing flakes are that altruistic.
DeleteOh, and the rest of the students know this. Maybe not (completely) consciously, but that part of their brain that subconsciously analyzes group decisions realized that to win, they had to depend on the altruism of some unknowns who had already screwed up.
You could make an interesting experiment out of different reward schemes. There's a paper in that somewhere...
Also, too, they are flakes. They don't believe that you would REALLY withhold 3% of their grade just because you said you would. That would be unfair to those who participated!
DeleteAlan from Apex is right, but you could modify the criteria to fix the issue. Instead of requiring 100% participation, require that the participation rate match the overall pass rate. You'd just have to be careful with the wording so that you don't make it sound like you're trying to get people who failed to not respond. I imagine that would look pretty bad.
DeleteWhy do it? Because it makes you look good to students because you offered extra credit. They can blame each other, not you, for not receiving it.
ReplyDeleteOh, Ben, it's always the teacher's fault. ALWAYS. They would conveniently forget the EC and just claim Miserable Adjunct was a meanie. Because DrNathaniel is right -- these are flakes we're discussing. Laziness rules, and they think 3% is too little to matter. Yet how often do we see some flake skip a small assignment worth that much of a grade? ALL. THE. TIME.
DeleteOur institution went to an all-electronic eval system recently that was supposed to be so awesome we were going to pee our pants over it. It has been a huge bust...it was much better when we used the good old paper and pencil Scantrons. I have begged, pleaded, offered plasma for them to complete it...and to no avail. So, now, unless someone wants to spit nails at me because they know they're screwed, or to kiss my ass anonymously, I can forget getting any kind of useful feedback. In one of my classes this semester, I had TWO of 18 students bother. They don't even care about their grades until post-semester, so why would they care enough to actually handle an evaluation in a mature fashion?
ReplyDeleteIt is ironic that the original point of evaluations was to give a voice to students. Now, we beg and plead with students to complete them.
DeleteSounds remarkably like voting.
DeleteThe only approach I've found that works is to have them all sit in a computer lab and fill them out (which works just fine with my hybrid classes, which are scheduled in computer labs, not so much so with other classes).
DeleteOccasionally, however, their laziness works in our favor. I had a student a semester or two ago who whined about absolutely everything. I was afraid she was going to slam me on the evals. When I listed them among the things they needed to do in a lab session, what do I hear, first thing, from my little whiner, "do we have to fill it out? does it affect our grade if we don't?" Hiding my glee (and glad she couldn't see the eye-rolls of her classmates), I simply answered "no." Shortest answer I gave her all semester.
This is actually a perennial experiment of an economics colleague of mine: will the class vote 100% to gain 10% extra credit? Or will each vote for just 1%, and get it regardless of their classmates' votes?
ReplyDeleteYou can only vote for 1% or 10%. If everyone trusted each other and did the 10% vote, they would all jump more than a grade. But instead, at least half choose the 1% only, and the remainder get nothing.
Uh,oh! Ground rules! All bad!
ReplyDelete