Althouse: "This class is sh*tty."

October 17, 2014

"This class is sh*tty."

25 comments:

Michael said...: Awesome. Really wonderful expressions of bewilderment, stoicism, irony and humor. No anger.; 10/17/14, 9:44 AM
pm317 said...: Do they all have tenure? I guess they do, since they laugh at the comments.

Comments, real, unreal, truthful, untruthful have destroyed tenure prospects for many and I bet most who lost were women.; 10/17/14, 10:08 AM
bleh said...: This is a rip off of Jimmy Kimmel's mean tweets bit, right?

BTW, Greg Mankiw's blog is great.; 10/17/14, 10:18 AM
Owen said...: pm317: If "comments, real, unreal, truthful, untruthful" have such a catastrophic effect, do you think the tenure committees might begin to notice that their decisions are being swayed or dictated by garbage inputs?
"...I bet most who lost were women." Evidence?; 10/17/14, 10:19 AM
David said...: Self confidence is a wonderful thing.; 10/17/14, 10:23 AM
bleh said...: There's something perverse about students commenting on and rating professors, especially in such a semi-official and coordinated manner. Universities really shouldn't take these gripes seriously.

I understand fundamentally that higher education is a product that students purchase. But the university's mission is not one that should be directed by the passions or desires of the students. The university's mission is to educate, which means some students are going to get bad grades or dislike the amount of work they have to do.

The student cannot be made into the boss. The intent is clear - to bully professors into being soft, to assign little reading, to give in to student demands that grades be changed, etc.; 10/17/14, 10:25 AM
Henry said...: How did Paul Krugman take Ec10 without anyone noticing?; 10/17/14, 10:30 AM
Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...: BDNYC said...
The student cannot be made into the boss. The intent is clear - to bully professors into being soft, to assign little reading,

RateMyProfessors is an unfiltered version of the same thing.; 10/17/14, 10:35 AM
DrMaturin said...: "There's something perverse about students commenting on and rating professors, especially in such a semi-official and coordinated manner. Universities really shouldn't take these gripes seriously".

I take seriously comments made about my teaching, positive and negative, provided that they are substantive and detailed. Comments like "The lecture was shitty" can be dismissed. A comment like "The lecture was too advanced for an introductory course" is very helpful.; 10/17/14, 10:37 AM
pm317 said...: @Owen, speaking from experience here. You don't know the skullduggery that goes on in these departments with incompetent department Chairs and their equally questionable processes and other people who want to undermine someone's future without much thought. Teaching metrics are the easiest to manipulate and use against a person. It is no secret that women professors typically get lesser teaching evaluation from students than male professors, esp. in disciplines where there are few women. I can give you links/articles but too lazy to dig them up. In my own case, I had the publications, I had research merit acknowledged by more than 6 outside peers in letters of recommendations, and funding. But the Chair implemented a faulty process to collect teaching related comments from students and he/they realized the flaws in the process (like all 15(!) comments may have come from the same or a small group of students and they had no way of verifying the veracity of the comments!) only after they got the results but they went with it anyway -- consider that I had taught 500+ students in the 6 years and they based it on 15 student comments and my own, end of class comments were above average and didn't have problems. It becomes a legal headache/precedent at some point for them and they would rather CYA than do the right thing. I as the candidate have next to nil chance of winning in a court case. There is more but I will stop here.; 10/17/14, 10:42 AM
Bob Ellison said...: BDNYC said "This is a rip off of Jimmy Kimmel's mean tweets bit, right?"

Right. Not as funny as Kimmel, but more self-centered.

There's no shame in ripping off. Fart Wars proves that.

Queso restavo (I rest my cheese).; 10/17/14, 10:47 AM
pm317 said...: Self confidence is a wonderful thing.

Agree completely. That has what got me through the years in spite of career-ending experience. One door shuts and you open another.; 10/17/14, 10:48 AM
rehajm said...: ...but I'm not going to let Ec10 win.

Someone's realizing most everything they've been taught about economics by Jon Stewart is shyte.

The second stage of loss is anger.; 10/17/14, 10:58 AM
MadisonMan said...: Yet all the students got As.; 10/17/14, 11:38 AM
Joe said...: "This class needs to reevaluate its expectations for Harvards' students sanity."

To which Steven Levitsky brilliantly responds: "It says that like it's a bad thing."; 10/17/14, 12:12 PM
Mike said...: @pm317, are you talking about anonymous teaching evaluations, or signed letters? I had to include the anonymous evaluations from every class I had ever taught when I went up for tenure; in addition, the department solicited signed letters from students to include in the file.

After getting tenure, I served on our department's retention and tenure committee. Much depends on the expectations of the institution, but in my brief experience on the committee I can honestly say that we did not treat women harsher than men.; 10/17/14, 12:16 PM
Richard Dolan said...: Funny. Pinker and Mankiw are both heavy hitters in their fields -- so this was probably a collection of H's first string professors. Nice that they could laugh at themselves.

We all had classes and professors whom we found so insufferable that the only solution was to skip them. Not necessarily the prof's fault -- just a failure to click. For me it was antitrust -- the professor was as dull as could be, his Socratic method was all Q and no A, and the classroom discussion was predictably meandering and confused. I may have attended two or three classes, and then just couldn't take any more. So I bought a handbook and showed up for the exam. Worked out OK, too.; 10/17/14, 12:40 PM
pm317 said...: @Mike, this was a separate survey they did just for the P&T review. My course evaluations at the end of each semester were fine (my students ended up in Google, Yahoo, Amazon, HP by virtue of the projects I gave them and they were all my ideas). None of it got through to the committee.

The first of three votes was teaching. A student was asked to administer the survey and he sent it to a blind distribution list that nobody knew who were on that list, whether the recipients took my classes or not, and who the students who responded to the survey were as in if it was the same student or multiple students and how many unique students. The survey was a clusterfuck and they voted on it anyway in the same meeting that the student presented the results from the survey. The faculty handbook said that I should be given an opportunity to respond to the results but that never happened. I didn't even know that they were voting my teaching that day.

After that point, I started knocking on every committee member door and talking to them. Some said they had not seen my dossier and not even my CV -- "who has the time to do that?" and there was only one copy of the dossier kept at the main office. So most were relying on the presenters information. The votes from the department were still majority positive but there were also abstainers who didn't agree with the process. If you can believe, the copy of the letter from the chair given to me (which was positive) that purportedly went up the chain had no date. I tried to see if he gave a different letter to the people up the chain but the university would not give me the copy that was in my dossier that was sent up.

The Dean who heard my concerns later commissioned his own survey, sent to randomly picked students from my class list and they were uniformly positive. The Dean, a wonderful man tried to reverse the course but the administrators went with a denial.

Women colleagues on the P&T were not supportive, if anything they became the problem. One (call her X) tried to undercut my merit and the other (call her Y)did not highlight the good I had done (even though she had benefited from my collaboration).

Next year, there was another woman (friend of X) who went up for tenure and the department spearheaded by woman Y, categorically said no to her tenure because her research was abysmal and majority P&T said, 'we let a strong case go last year, and why should we approve this?' However, the administrators balked/panicked at the thought of two denials (to women candidates) in a row and granted her tenure reversing the department's majority NO vote.; 10/17/14, 1:52 PM
pm317 said...: A 2011 survey found that 95 percent of working women felt they were undercut by another woman at least once during their professional life. Count me among that 95%.; 10/17/14, 1:58 PM
Annie said...: However, the administrators balked/panicked at the thought of two denials (to women candidates) in a row and granted her tenure reversing the department's majority NO vote.

And you had no recourse, even after their acknowledgement that you were a stronger case?; 10/17/14, 2:02 PM
Annie said...: Comments, real, unreal, truthful, untruthful have destroyed tenure prospects for many and I bet most who lost were women.

Because of other women.; 10/17/14, 2:03 PM
CatherineM said...: Did anyone notice how many are credited for making this shitty little video?; 10/17/14, 2:13 PM
Bob R said...: Lots of expensive dental work on display.; 10/17/14, 3:14 PM
pm317 said...: And you had no recourse, even after their acknowledgement that you were a stronger case?

The P&T deliberations are supposed to be confidential. It was leaked to me that the members felt that way during their deliberations on that case. It is not usable information for me to help myself in any way. Legal tenure cases always side with the university unless there is glaring discrimination or some thing similar.; 10/17/14, 3:22 PM
Unknown said...: The most stinging student evaluation comment I ever received when I taught was
"The Professor tells a lot of jokes but none of them are funny."
Ouch!; 10/18/14, 1:17 AM