Michael O'Hare: Malpractice with chalk on our sleeves:
My colleague Philip Stark, in our statistics department, is on the job…. Student evaluations of teaching (SET’s) have many important advantages as a quality assurance mechanism. First, they are extremely cheap…. Second, they completely protect faculty from engaging with each other about pedagogy…. Third, it has never been shown conclusively that outsourcing teaching quality assurance in this way has damaged any core values, neither research productivity nor the record of the football team. Nor parking, I guess….
Do good SET’s indicate more learning by students? On the Berkeley Teaching Blog, along with the director of our Teaching and Learning Center, Richard Freishtat, Philip has posted the first and the second of three analyses of what we know about this, and his findings are devastating… to the claim that we are managing the resources society has given us in the way we say we are, for excellence in research and teaching. (If you are a student at Cal, or a taxpayer in California, you should be in the streets with pitchforks and torches. If you are our new chancellor (or our new president), fixing this should be your Job One….
Continue reading "Michael O'Hare: Malpractice with chalk on our sleeves: Noted" »