A recent op-ed in the Guardian, entitled “I’m not LMAO at ridiculous student emails” lodges a familiar complaint: students don’t know how to communicate with professors in a professional manner, flaunting reasonable social codes and ignoring professors busy lives outside the classroom. Such ignorance and lack of decorum will surely hinder these students future efforts…
This post is occasioned by Ben Schmidt’s wonderful tool for exploring gender differences on words used in student evaluations on RateMyProfessor. 1. RateMyProfessor is a huge, but awful data set. Why awful? First, I’d bet that well under 1% of the students who take a course rate the professor on RateMyProfessor. For example, I went…
In my last post, I took issue with the PayScale college rankings, as well as with how economics reporters framed these rankings, citing their low calculated Return on Investment as evidence that these colleges “make” students poor. Jordan Weissmann has graciously responded to my critique. The Senior Vice President from PayScale itself has also responded in a comment on my post,…
Jordan Weissman has moved from the Atlantic, and is now covering economics at Slate. He has a post up provocatively titled (it is Slate, after all) “What College Will Leave you Poorest?” which covers the Payscale college salary rankings, in which Payscale.com ranks colleges based on the cost of the college offset by the reported salaries of…
As I prepare my tenure portfolio, I am catching up on entering in my student evaluation data and comments into my big spreadsheet. While I don’t think student evaluations should serve as the only data by which to judge teachers, they are full of valuable information about teaching, as long as you are willing to…
To continue from my last post, one of the elements that disturbed me about defining scientist as “gets grants, has groundbreaking ideas” is not just that this narrow definition of scientist excludes worthy people, but also that it excludes certain activities of people (like myself) who already consider themselves scientists. While I don’t have the…
My piece for the Atlantic ran yesterday, on how student learning is not directly connected to exploitative labor policies. I had some interesting conversations, on twitter and over email, so I thought I would share those with my readers. It is also different to work with an editor for another outlet (for a broader readership)…
It seems a requirement that any conversation about higher education in America must begin and end with costs and economic outcomes. Along the way, our economic analysts nod to the power of knowledge (economic research shows it improves career prospects!), or the value of an educated citizenry (it produces more innovation, which of course produces…
I’m putting some finishing touches on my syllabi here the night before classes start, and I thought I would share with my blog readers a one-page statement of my teaching philosophy that I put on each of my syllabi. Anyone do anything similar? Please share in the comments. A note about my teaching philosophy I…
