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There’s a fascinating piece up today at The Chronicle‘s website on a new trend in student course evaluation — “smart” recommendation systems.
The premise is that course evaluations, on their own, don’t tell provide you with as much information as they could about how you’re likely to respond to (and how well you’re likely to do in) a particular class. If most of the folks taking “Immigration in America” are upper-level Sociology majors, and you’re a Bio student looking to fill out a distribution requirement, the fact that the prof gets high ratings for clarity doesn’t tell you a lot about whether you’re likely to sink or swim.
A smart course recommendation system, on the other hand, can pull out course evaluations from students like you — same year, same major, even similar GPAs — to see how folks in your position responded to a given class or professor. As the Chronicle notes, it’s basically applying the Netflix “our best guess for you” approach to movie ratings to the world of academic advising.
While writing my dissertation, I uncovered evidence that student course evaluations first appeared in the late 1940s as a program of the National Student Association, a student-run organization that eventually grew to be one of the largest and most important student activist groups in American history. The course evaluation program at my own alma mater, in fact, started as an NSA-inspired project.
Student course evaluations have since been adopted by colleges and universities themselves, of course, even as sites like Rate My Professor have sprung up to provide students with franker, less filtered feedback. But as someone who is now on the receiving end of such evaluations, I know that they’re still often frustratingly vague and incomplete, and this kind of demographic number crunching strikes me as a big step in the direction of making them more valuable for everyone.
The students occupying a building at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have made it through their first night, and they’ve released a list of demands:
Because we are residents of Minnesota, and because this is a public, land-grant university,
We demand the right to peacefully occupy space at our university,
We demand that the general public has reasonable access to university resources;
We demand that the university respect the rights of all workers to organize and to earn at least a living wage;
We demand tuition and fee reductions;
We demand that regents be democratically elected by the university community;
We demand that the university treat student groups fairly and equitably with respect to funding and space. We demand student groups on the 2nd floor of Coffman Union be able to keep their spaces.
In doing so, we stand in solidarity with the people of Wisconsin, and students and workers worldwide.
More soon…
This is so weird.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new opinion piece out today in which an adjunct professor named Elayne Clift describes a class that went completely off the rails. Apparently the first session was a disaster (although Clift refuses to say what happened), and she was never able to get things back on track. In twenty years of teaching, she says, she had “never … seen such extraordinarily bad behavior in [her] students.” Even some of their classmates agreed: “I’ve never seen such disrespect for a teacher,” she quotes one of them as saying.
I get this. Sometimes you wind up wrong-footed early in the term, and things just … deteriorate. Whether it’s because a relationship with a vocal student has turned adversarial, because you’ve failed to articulate your expectations clearly, or just because you can’t quite manage to dispel an odd mood, it’s surprisingly easy to discover, a month or two in, that a class has gone weird on you.
But that dynamic isn’t what this prof wants to talk about. Executing a sharp rhetorical pivot in her fifth paragraph, Clift emerges in the sixth with this:
“The sad thing is, I’m not alone. Every college teacher I know is bemoaning the same kind of thing. Whether it’s rude behavior, lack of intellectual rigor, or both, we are all struggling with the same frightening decline in student performance and academic standards at institutions of higher learning. A sense of entitlement now pervades the academy, excellence be damned.”
Wait, what? You just said that the students’ behavior in this class shocked both you and their own peers. You just said — twice — that this group’s behavior was utterly outside your experience. This class was three semesters ago. How can it reflect a universal trend already?
The rest of the piece is standard-issue student-bashing boilerplate. Students suck these days, she says. They’re lazy and entitled. They’ve got cellphones. They cheat.
But the kicker for me is that her biggest academic complaint about this new generation — and I swear this is a direct quote — is their fondness for “unsubstantiated generalizations, hyperbolic assumptions, [and] ungrounded polemics.”
Yeah. I hate that stuff too.
Twenty-seven faculty members from the City University of New York were arrested in a budget protest at the New York state capitol yesterday, along with six CUNY students.
The thirty-three were participating in a joint CUNY/SUNY protest organized by the Professional Staff Congress, a faculty union. The governor’s proposed budget slashes funding to New York’s two public higher education systems by $170 million.
NPR is reporting that Northern Arizona University has installed ID card scanners at some lecture halls so that student attendance in large classes can be taken automatically. Apparently NAU is the first college in the country to do this.
I’m no opponent, in principle, of taking attendance in college, though I know many student activists are. In my view, class participation can be a legitimate component of a student’s grade, and you can’t participate if you’re not present. (Beyond that, I do think that it’s a professor’s prerogative to discourage absenteeism by taking attendance, even if it’s only to save some students from themselves.)
But I’ve got a few concerns about this scheme.
First, it seems to me that college attendance is nowhere less important than in huge lecture classes. A lecture is by definition non-interactive — in many cases, a student will get as much from listening to a friend’s recording of a class session as she would by sitting through the class itself. So why shouldn’t that be a legitimate option? Why should a student be penalized for that?
Second, this kind of automated attendance system invites abuse. As a professor, my belief is that the way to keep cheating out of my classroom is to raise the stakes. I organize my classes so that cheating is difficult, catching cheaters is easy, the ethical ramifications of cheating are obvious, and the consequences of cheating are severe. But because these scanners fail to meet any of those standards, they may invite students to see gaming the system as no big deal.
There are a bunch of reasons why students skip class, and a bunch of ways to discourage them from doing so. But the more I think about this particular one, the less I like it.
What’s your take? When should profs take attendance? Is this a legitimate way to do it?
studentactivism.net 
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