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If a professor is very famous for his research and belongs to the most prestigious academies of science for his lifetime work, I find it unusual that the math department would ask us to evaluate him. We did so anyway and submitted the evaluations to the director of academic affairs.

Is this typically done at most American universities, irrespective of a professor's age, status or fame? I would think that after a certain point in a professor's career, student evaluations aren't necessary.

Is it sort of a sanity check? He was 85 years old. Is it done to try and find reasons to force retirement of professors?

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    Maybe they want to evaluate something other than his fame. – clueless Aug 23 '16 at 10:19
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    In every university I've known in the US, students submit evaluations of their professors and courses every semester, irrespective the course level or the professor's rank. Now, whether anyone pays attention to said evaluations may indeed depend heavily on those factors. – user0721090601 Aug 23 '16 at 11:34
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    Some of my best instructors weren't tenured faculty nor famous for research, they just loved teaching – Doug T. Aug 23 '16 at 15:19
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    A more charitable formulation of "...to try and find reasons to force retirement..." is "...so that we notice when, due to old age, someone is no longer able to teach effectively and should not be asked to do so anymore..." – zwol Aug 23 '16 at 15:43
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    Could even be that the school is trying to recognize him with some sort of award, and they're trying to build the case. – Scott Seidman Aug 23 '16 at 16:56
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    There are reasons to collect data about performance other than punishing bad behaviour and rewarding good. Perhaps the university is doing a study to see how well experience of teacher correlates to evaluation outcomes; in that case, the data you give them on this teacher is extremely valuable. I can think of many reasons why a university would want to collect such data uniforming on all professors. – Eric Lippert Aug 23 '16 at 17:32
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    In the US it would be more unusual not to do the normal course evaluations. Why do you think that this professor should be given a special accommodation? – Ukko Aug 23 '16 at 19:13
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    Find me someone so good at what they do that they can't improve and I'll call them a liar. – corsiKa Aug 23 '16 at 20:25
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    If he is known as a bad teacher (in addition to a good researcher), then the situation is probably obvious. If he is a good teacher, consider the fact that he may have become a good teacher by carefully collecting and evaluating student feedback over his teaching career (in one way or another, official evaluations, conversations with students, etc) and this is just business as usual. – user2407038 Aug 23 '16 at 23:01
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    @ScottSeidman ... that was my thought. They are building a dossier to submit hoping to get him an outstanding teaching award. – GEdgar Aug 24 '16 at 00:20
  • In our department it has previously been the case that professors or other teachers could explicitly ask to be part of evaluation or to have a course evaluated. Then the department would take care of it, so it is not a biased evaluation. It can be extremely helpful to know what your students are thinking, especially if you think you can take it no matter what they say. – skymningen Aug 24 '16 at 07:37
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    Once you start with "he is exempt from evaluation because he is famous", five more people will step up and ask "Am I not famous enough to be exempt, too?". It is much, much easier to have a blanket rule "everyone should be evaluated, no matter what". – Federico Poloni Aug 24 '16 at 12:16
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    Have you had other professors evaluated? We (in my school in the US) always had the opportunity to evaluate our professors. Sometimes, however, a university employee would come do it in person. I believe this was randomly selected. – mikeazo Aug 24 '16 at 17:04
  • @clueless whatever they want to measure, it appears that they rarely achieve that result. – Alberto Santini Aug 24 '16 at 18:11
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    Sometimes, professors actually take the evaluations seriously in attempting to improve their own teaching, even if nobody else pays attention to the evaluations. Folks in those positions are sometimes the same ones who like to do something well if they're going to do it. – WBT Aug 24 '16 at 20:25
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    It could be that the university is trying to norm the scale. If Professor Nobel Prize rates 3/5, then maybe we can retain professors scoring 2/5 and give out bonuses to professors scoring 4/5. – emory Aug 25 '16 at 14:14
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    A professor I've worked with was tenured for many years. When his department started collecting teaching evaluations from all courses, rather than only at the discretion of the instructor when they were tenured full professors, it arose that he was among the worst regarded teachers in the department. This inspired him to pay more attention to what made for effective teaching, and adjust his habits accordingly. A semester later, his evaluations had shifted to above average. Additionally, his research group had an easier time attracting qualified undergrad students to work on projects. – Phil Miller Aug 25 '16 at 20:13
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    It might be nice to get some more context. Are these regular end of semester evaluations, as people are mentioning, or is the department reaching out to specific students to get their opinions? Are you a grad student, undergrad? Is this your first semester and you're curious why end of the semester evaluations are taking place? – jfa Aug 26 '16 at 16:53

7 Answers7

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Being a good teacher and being a good researcher are distinct skills. If someone has a job that requires both skills, they should be being evaluated on both.

Patricia Shanahan
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    Teachers also get lazy over the years. Evaluations do their job of keeping a minimum level of professionality in classes. – image357 Aug 23 '16 at 10:15
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    This addresses why a famous researcher gets some evaluations, at least in the beginning, but not why it happens every semester forever. The answer to that is in part "blanket university policies" addressed in other answers, but I also think in part because universities want to give all students equal opportunities to provide feedback on their experiences. – Kimball Aug 23 '16 at 10:40
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    This answer tells us why you think experienced professors should be evaluated but does not really answer as to why universities do it. The reason is that such policies apply to all profs. – Cape Code Aug 23 '16 at 14:11
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    When I was in school I had a brilliant mathematician as a prof. Undergrad calculus was like childs play to him and I think he really enjoyed teaching the class. Unfortunately, his students didn't enjoy his teaching because he was one of those people who lacked the skills necessary to be a good teacher. Many a sleepless night I spent contemplating my future on the assembly line. Next quarter I took the "calculus for dummies" track, got the assistant dean of the math department, and learned everything I should have learned earlier. This guy could teach! – Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні Aug 23 '16 at 23:11
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    @Kimball I think you should read the answer as describing evaluation of someone's current teaching skills, on the courses they're currently teaching. To get that information, you have to keep evaluating forever. – Cascabel Aug 24 '16 at 00:22
  • @CapeCode And the reason why such policies apply to all professors is explained in the answer (at least cursorily, but in my opinion entirely sufficiently). – Konrad Rudolph Aug 24 '16 at 10:23
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    @KonradRudolph my impression is that it has more to do with not having to decide who needs evaluation and who does not, and to avoid hurting sensibilities or being accused of discrimination or whatnot. The truth is a top researcher can probably have disastrous student evaluations and that would have 0 consequence to her or him. – Cape Code Aug 24 '16 at 15:24
  • @CapeCode it may be true that student evaluations (in general) have a relatively small influence. But simply because other factors may have a bigger influence doesn’t mean that they are completely worthless, even for prestigious/old professors. A University that stops evaluating certain staff has to ask itself some very serious questions. – Konrad Rudolph Aug 24 '16 at 15:28
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    @CapeCode or this top researcher/poor teacher will be assigned to highly specialised classes (last 2 semester) or assigned only to research and advisory. The good teacher with poor research outcome will be assigned for early classes where treir attitude is crucial. – Crowley Aug 25 '16 at 11:42
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Is this typically done at most American universities, irrespective of a professor's age, status or fame?

Yes. It's likely a required process of the administration, as negotiated in the faculty contract. It's probably not something your department has any say over; and in a case such as you describe, the resulting product is likely to be mostly ignored.

It's probably not worth anyone's time to hammer out every imaginable exceptional case to such procedures (the faculty contract and handbook, outlining procedures, is usually already mind-bendingly long). This is what work is like in a large institution; rules apply to all, and have many stakeholders, and not everyone gets their every whim or convenience satisfied.

Daniel R. Collins
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  • I was about to say that it's very rare for tenure stream faculty to be in unions in the US, but I clicked through to your profile and see you're at one of the three universities with faculty unions that came to mind. Of course, your main point holds true regardless. – Noah Snyder Aug 24 '16 at 13:44
  • @NoahSnyder: Thanks, although this article at Times Higher Education says 28% of all faculty were unionized in 2011, so I'm not sure that counts as "very rare". I conjecture that if we only counted tenured faculty it would be higher? -- https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/unions-reap-rewards-as-us-professoriate-fights-to-keep-gains/415723.article – Daniel R. Collins Aug 24 '16 at 14:18
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    I thought adjunct unions were much more common than tt unions, though I admit I could be wrong. Also I know very little about community colleges, which are going to make a huge difference in the raw numbers, but not be relevant to the question. – Noah Snyder Aug 24 '16 at 19:05
  • @NoahSnyder: Anyway, I edited out the "union" modifier. It was news to me that's a minority of faculty; thank you for that observation. – Daniel R. Collins Aug 24 '16 at 19:52
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I'm in Australia, and from my experience, almost every unit is evaluated every semester that it runs in pretty much all Australian universities. There might be a few exceptions, but this is just standard practice. The standard survey consists of a bunch of closed ended questions and then some open ended questions for more qualitative feedback.

From this perspective, there's nothing special about whether the instructor is a famous professor or a relatively unknown academic. Student evaluations are just a standard component of university life. It would be strange to make an exception, just because the professor is famous.

More generally, student evaluations serve a wide range of purposes and the relevance of most would not change whether or not the instructor is a famous professor. Such evaluations give the instructor feedback about how the unit was received by students. It can highlight areas for improvement. From a university perspective, it creates some accountability and some metrics that can be monitored.

Of course, there are also plenty of issues with student evaluations. And there is the potential if they are used inappropriately that they can create perverse incentives for instructors: e.g., simplifying education, grade inflation, and so on in order to have "happier students". But that's another issue.

Jeromy Anglim
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That "Regular Full-time Tenured Faculty ... Shall be evaluated at least once in every three academic years" is part of my institution's faculty contract (collective bargaining agreement). I doubt this is an unusual provision. If they are public, check out the terms under which your professors work!

Aaron Brick
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I have known professors who with good justification were extremely famous for brilliant research done in the past, but (a) they were hopeless lecturers, and/or (b) they were clearly in decline and not keeping up with the latest developments in the field: in some cases even teaching ideas that were now superseded.

Michael Kay
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  • Not completely relevant, as evaluations written by undergraduate students are unlikely to be able to assess whether superseded material is being taught. – Ben Voigt Aug 25 '16 at 18:45
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When newer faculty members come up for tenure, their teaching evaluations are compared against the department average. So, it makes sense to administer the same questionnaire to everyone to obtain the full population sample as a baseline.

200_success
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Let's follow that thought for a bit:

Your goal is to only evaluate the bad teachers, but not the good ones.

How do you tell the bad teachers from the good ones? I suggest you use evaluations. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Because some people who run universities think that way, student evaluations are often somewhat standardized and required for all teachers.

Peter
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