Daily ReCCAP: 1/18/12
Imposing a new funding model on top of the existing business typically doesn’t work. Instead management needs to create an autonomous organization that can craft its new business model from scratch as the innovation demands…
Students are graduating with low skill sets and many are basically unemployable. The truth hurts. Many of our graduates did everything they were asked, but forgot to learn along the way. Jumped hoops, paid bills, went to class. But didn’t learn. Didn’t grow. They essentially “did time.” We call it college…
April Bleske-Rechek and Amber Fritsch
At the same time as some faculty committees and corporations are appealing to the use of online ratings from RateMyProfessors.com to inform promotion decisions and nationwide university rankings, others are derogating the site as an unreliable source of idiosyncratic student ratings and commentary. In this paper we describe a study designed to test the assumption that students’ ratings are unreliable. The sample included 366 instructors with 10 or more student ratings. Contrary to the assumption that students’ ratings are unreliable, variance in students’ ratings about a given instructor was similar across number of raters, with 10 raters showing the same degree of consensus as 50 or more raters. Students showed the most consensus about instructors who were among the top third of the distribution in quality, and this effect occurred even among instructors rated as the most difficult. Taken alongside other investigations of RateMyProfessors.com and the broad literature on student evaluations of teaching, our findings suggest that students who use RateMyProfessors.com are likely providing each other with useful information about quality of instruction.
Do colleges help or hurt character formation? Some students work hard, particularly when they add a part-time, bill-paying job to their classes, and some colleges demand hard work, but many students have an implicit deal with many professors: Neither will work hard.
Larry Gordon (H/T ‘The Ticker“)
The University of California Board of Regents is scheduled this week to discuss a highly unusual proposal to fire a veteran tenured professor and deny him the perks of emeritus retirement.
The case involves a UC Riverside international finance professor who has been in lengthy court disputes over UC allegations that he improperly received outside income during sabbaticals.
Because of confidentiality rules covering personnel actions, the regents’ agenda item mentions only an unnamed UC Riverside professor; it does not give a reason for the possible discipline. University officials refuse to release those details, saying that would violate privacy rules.