If there are any "liberal" profs in Aggieland, they better not anger the College Republicans, or it will cost them ten grand!

I also grew up among academics and have a number of professor friends, and I think you're right that teaching is undervalued by universities. But in my experience, those who care the most about teaching are the most negative on student evaluations. According to them, it's relatively easy to get good evaluations: be mildly entertaining and never give bad grades. The bad evaluations come, they say, when you expect your students to work hard. I don't know what the answer is, though...

Regardless of the academics you grew up with, a lot of us value teaching extremely highly. But what you don't understand is that if you give bonuses for high teaching evaluations, what is the purpose of challenging students? Why not just let them watch a lot of movies, let them skip class, assign a very small amount of reading, and give everyone an A? Quality of teaching and good teaching evaluations are not the same thing. If you challenge your students and force them to work hard, the reality is that you are not going to get the top teaching evals because students will complain that there was too much reading.

Plus, students are going to know that they are voting on what teachers should get extra money. Don't you see the inherent problems with that?

Depends where you teach, really. If you're at a liberal arts college or even a regional university, teaching is your main focus. At PhD producing schools, though, the emphasis is on research and grants.

My post acknowledges the value of incentives to reward good teaching, especially at those institutions. Whether student evals are the proper method of assessment is the real issue.

Teaching should certainly be given more prestige, especially at research universities. Many academics view teaching as a chore and take a punitive attitude toward students -- blaming them for the teacher's own inability to inspire and instruct. In my experience students are responsive to you if you put the work in -- but that takes energy and may only be possible for those who see teaching as a vocation. I'd be delighted with a qualitative shift that allows good teachers to advance in the profession (as opposed to advancement based primarily on publications). That said, student evaluations can only be one measurement as it's true that otherwise teaching becomes a beauty contest. Some sort of peer review of teaching, combined with records of grades given and student evaluations might work and should be tried. I'm sure parents would approve too.

at my major university research is valued more highly than teaching. research deserves to be highly valued because an important role of professors is to train the next generation of researchers and professors. Unfortunately, however, this causes some of the undergraduate education to suffer.

I've seen great teachers struggle to get tenure because they are not sufficiently "cutting edge." We need a system that values the best teachers better. But basing this on student evaluations doesn't seem like the right way to do it.

I'd be sympathetic except for one thing: I grew up among academics. And I have never since met a class of people so contemptuous of teaching.

Jesus H. Christ. Stereotype much? What on earth makes you think that your experience growing up was universal?

There's a discussion to be had about higher education, but starting off with "all professors hate teaching" is utterly stupid.

A couple of points. First, as a lot of data shows, getting good teaching evaluations doesn't really have any correlation to getting your students to learn more. It's a measure, above all, of how funny and attractive you are, whether or not you have a foreign accent, and how easy it is to get an A in your class.

But since we're arguing with anecdotes here and not data, let me say something about my own experience. I love teaching. It's the only part of being an academic in the humanities where you get near-immediate gratification for your efforts and a daily, incremental sense that your work is actually accomplishing something. When you see the lightbulb go on over a student's head, it can make your day. (Doing research, by contrast, is always painfully slow going.) In addition to loving teaching, and trying to be good at it, I get pretty good course evals. You know why? Not because I'm a good teacher. Lots of my friends and colleagues are great teachers, and still don't get great course evals. The difference is, I'm tall, I dress well, I'm reasonably attractive, and I can crack jokes students laugh at. Those mad skillz have earned me actual awards for teaching, awards that other great teachers I know will never get, because they're short or have accents.

One other point. It's not like Texas A&M doesn't know that teaching evals are near useless indicators of teaching quality. Everyone in the busniess knows that. Which brings us to the essential cynicism of their move. They know perfectly well they're not taking steps to reward good teaching. They know all they're doing is taking steps to be seen to be taking steps to reward good teaching. And voila! Good press in the wonkosphere. It's worked!

But hey, I won't complain. If I ever move to Texas A&M, I'll know exactly how to get a taste of that money. I'll just keep dressing well, keep dropping references to cool indie music in class, and keep cracking jokes.

1. Incentives that don't involve tenure will prove to be ineffective.

2. I am an academic (20 years). No matter where I've taught, I've noticed that student evaluations rarely track anything other than their grades. "If I get a good grade, I'm happy, so I had a good prof."

3. Effective teaching is extraordinarily difficult and is an area of active scientific research (something that I do in the field of physics). Among all the participants in academia, students are the most poorly positioned to make quality judgments of effective teaching. If it is a puzzle for researchers, how can they be expected to evaluate, knowing none of the research and having a vanishingly small amount of experience? It's like putting Bush in charge of the government, for god's sake.

4. I've lost track of the number of former students who have raked me over the coals at the end of my intro physics class, only to come back later and tell me that their experience with me was the only thing that got them through that part of the MCAT or into graduate school. The truth is that they don't know what will be useful to them until they have to go use it, and that happens after the evaluation.

5. This is not to say that student evaluations are worthless. If I look beyond the "I'm happy with my grade" issue, I can seek out information about ways to make my class more comfortable or accommodating to people with differing backgrounds, I can identify aspects of my course that were not as effective as I would wish, and so on.

But in the last year of my previous job, I pre/post tested my class (150 students -- good sample size) with a research based conceptual assessment. I got a 95% gain. I also got mixed student evaluations, and left partly as a result of a small number of highly disgruntled students. You tell me which is more informative.

Thanks Bob Oso for reminding us that David Horowitz has new heights to scale.

I won't claim to have been a great teacher, so I don't have a problem with the average ratings I got as a TA back in grad school, but I agree that they are not great measures. Case in point, I got a distinctly bad rating once because I had a tiny class (ten students) of which only half showed up for the evaluation day. Even a "full" recitation of 25 students would not be a statistically significant sample. As it happened with my small class, the two best students missed and the two worst students showed up for one of the few times that semester...thus securing me a shockingly low result because 2/5 of the class was invalid (if they show up once in a semester, they cannot accurately evaluate my teaching.)

I'm getting a humanities Ph.D. at a research university, and it's my experience that the faculty and the grad students value both teaching and research. Like Ass Prof, I think there are rewards for both (even if the teaching rewards aren't institutionalized into the tenure track as much as the research), and I don't think that they're necessarily locked in a zero sum game where it's either one or the other. The best teachers, in my experience, bring their research into the classroom. The link between research and teaching may be another reason students aren't in the best position to evaluate (in addition to the influence of chili peppers).

I think the folks who are worried about mediocre but easy/fun teachers getting the best review while better but more rigorous teachers get screwed is missing the point. At many research universities teachers on the mediocre to good part of the spectrum are a distinct minority, while completely terrible teachers with zero interest in teaching are the vast majority. People who spend time working on teaching undergrads effectively are considered "eccentric" at best, and "complete suckers" at worst. The real work is all done at the graduate research level. The undergrad stuff is a sideshow (If you watch House MD its like the comic relief scence at the free clinic). The A&M program should be though of as a 10k penalty to try and break professors out of the line of thinking.

At many research universities teachers on the mediocre to good part of the spectrum are a distinct minority, while completely terrible teachers with zero interest in teaching are the vast majority.

I disagree. Having spent the better part of two decades taking courses at research universities (and having taught at them), I would only name one or two professors in that time as terrible, or even poor.

Agreed with Scott--pickandroll seems to be repeating a stereotype rather than offering realistic analysis of teaching at big institutions.

There may be SOME professors who don't care about teaching. But MOST care at least enough to be "mediocre to good." At a whole lot work their asses off at teaching.

"folks...is missing the point"

Certainly someone failed you, educationally.

As a former Texas A&M student who moved onto grad school I read this article with interest.
First, to the author PLEASE do not refer to us as Texas in "Texas's maneuver". We are not that university down in Austin, we are Texas A&M.
Second I think this article highlights the famous academic study of "Hoping for A while Rewarding for B". Professors get awarded for research, which is easier to quantify, than for teaching which is harder. The problem is teaching is main directive for professors, and a good majority do a poor job at it. The professors I had at A&M which span the range from liberal arts, to mathematics, science, and even foreign languages were for the most part quality instructors. Those who weren't were given the subsequent negative feedback, which accomplished nothing.
Professors need to be help accountable for what they are charged with doing, teaching students, instead of bringing in the research dollars. Student evaluations are supposedly part of the system of tenure track and rewards already, what exactly is wrong with bringing to the forefront the main job of professors?

Old Ag, please tell us you were an English major at A&M.

Old Ag,

Nothing is wrong with bringing teaching to the forefront. The problem, and it's amazing to me that Ezra doesn't see this, is that course evaluations are precisely the wrong way to do it. While course evaluations have some value, hard teachers get marked down for assigning too much work while easy teachers are rewarded.

Moreover, if I get paid extra for good teaching evaluations, what's to stop me from just showing movies and giving everyone and A?

At my school, the summer term courses have no evaluations. Plus, you get paid by how many students you attract to your class. The result--a race to the bottom where everyone offers the easiest classes possible because it is in their interest to do so.

I'm surprised Ezra doesn't see that the incentives of using teaching evaluations in this case are pretty bad. As others have said, this bonus means I have more incentive to make sure my students like me, but I'm not clear on how this necessarily makes me want to be a better teacher...

Ezra-

Love your blog, but this was not one of your better notes. I've been a professor for 20+ years. I was an undergrad and grad student at some top universities. I ran into many professors at those universities who loved teaching and worked very hard. And at my own, if you're a poorly evaluated teacher, you're not going to get tenure. And my colleagues (in one of the strongest departments of the university) value teaching, with one exception.

Yes, there are some professors who do not value teaching. There are some universities, I suspect where teaching is valued less than at others. But please, do not stereotype.

And do not underestimate the danger of bad forms of accountability. If you reward professors for being popular, they'll be popular. I, for one, don't care a whit about popularity. I want ones who will push students' abilities. Student evaluations don't capture that. The best way I've been able to assess is to listen to the talented students describe their experiences with different professors, and their knowledge of areas having worked with those professors. (Of course, this wouldn't capture my favorite work, a number of times I've worked doggedly with students to pull them from D's to C's.)

Back when I was in film school at San Francisco State, I had to write a feature length script as part of the core curriculum. I'd crank out about 20-30 pages a week, make photocopies and give them to the associate professor who was teaching the class. He was a fun professor: he used to invite us down to his house in Palo Alto for barbecues and had great pot. When you're in college living on mac 'n' cheese and peanut butter, having a freshly grilled steak was pretty neat, as was having wine that had a cork in the bottle.

I probably would have given him a good evaluation notwithstanding this fact: he continually gave me recommendations on my script and I would rewrite until finally I begin to surmise that he wasn't reading a word I wrote! so I inserted something in the middle of a dialogue passage that was long enough to distract someone reading it, but read about like the first page of Finnegan's Wake.

I met with him after he "read" that section, but he merely totted up the same recommendations, so I started writing more nonsense, but nothing changed.

The steak and wine was great, however.

"Teaching takes a lot of time but doesn't play a big role in tenure or promotion. Which is why Texas's maneuver makes sense."

Which is exactly why it *doesn't* make sense. teaching takes time. Bingo. If you want good teaching, you need teachers who actually have time for teaching. My experience as being the spouse of an assistant professor (at a moderately competitive University) is that the lack of time is really the controlling factor. Classes started yesterday and my spouse has three important deadlines this week. She hasn't had any time to prepare teaching and is going to show a movie in class. What else would you do? Btw the students will love it.

Professors, especially those not yet tenured, simply have too many tasks and not enough resources to adequately fulfill all of them. Professor is really a conglomerate of several separate jobs: research, teaching, management. It is in many ways similar to managing a small business, except that you also have extensive public service responsibilities. It's like asking a midlevel business executive working 60 hour weeks and constantly under pressure to deliver this and that to also teach a few classes. Even though most professors are underpaid and could use 10k extra, they are not going to neglect research and risk losing their grants unless the whole system of incentives is changed, and humanized.

David Horowitz has new heights to scale. I almost forget it.

The research out there backs up Ass Prof and Paul Camp's comments, and suggests that evaluations are even more troubling than they mention. Student evaluations do reward expected good grades and whether the teacher is seen as attractive. But beyond that, they penalize women and minorities in general (not just teachers with accents). Students seem to have a mental idea of what a professor should be -- tall, white guy, maybe tweedy, but attractiveness and a sense of humor are plusses -- and they reward conformity with that archetype. But university administrations love evaluations because they're quantifiable. Never mind that there are all sorts of sample issues and systematic bias against women and minorities.

That said, I'm not sure how one compensates for those biases. Peer evaluations can do a lot to detect quality teaching that students might not value (the "difficult" teacher who nonetheless teaches students a lot), but they are vulnerable to personal bias. If your colleagues think you're a nice guy and a valuable researcher, they'll probably also think you're a good teacher unless you're truly awful. Conversely, if you're the department jerk, colleagues will take negative student evaluations much more seriously.

This has got to be the most asinine thing Ezra has ever posted. Let's reverse his formulation: Some students want teachers to be more accountable for their teaching. I'd be sympathetic except for one thing: I work with college students. And I have never since met a class of people so contemptuous of learning. You'd think they were being asked to chew mud.

It's like saying that tipping is the best way to hold servers accountable for their service. Of course, in reality, the servers who get the most tips are those who know the best tricks and manipulations for getting tips…but by God, we've got to hold them accountable somehow!!

I'm just starting to TA a class on Video Game Culture. My suspicion from what I've observed of the class so far is that its filled with students who are really in to video games who think it will be an easy class. And by all means it should be, the amount of reading is really light.

So, when I come to section on Friday and find that half of the students haven't read the 7 page article we're supposed to discuss, or written the 1 page reading response paper - what do I do?

I've I'm a hardass about it, they might actually do the readings and learn something. If not, I might get better evals, but they'll learn less. I'm going to be a hardass.

if A&M were serious it would include a teaching component as part of the tenure decision process instead of creating an incentive for grade inflation

students looking for great teaching by senior faculty so avoid research universities

Which is why Texas's maneuver makes sense.

Old Ag is right. This is akin to speaking of a policy at Auburn University by saying "Alabama's move makes sense."

'Texas' = The University of Texas (in Austin)

Good policy or not, we don't want to be lumped in with the Aggies anymore than they want to be lumped in with us...

Teaching is a skill; an art in itself, which is something most academics outside education school don't really appreciate.

I had professors read from scripts, rant and rave about whatever is on their mind at that moment, shoot the shit with students about the weather etc.

Educational, those classes weren't.

The research out there backs up Ass Prof and Paul Camp's comments, and suggests that evaluations are even more troubling than they mention. Student evaluations do reward expected good grades and whether the teacher is seen as attractive. But beyond that, they penalize women and minorities in general (not just teachers with accents). Students seem to have a mental idea of what a professor should be -- tall, white guy, maybe tweedy, but attractiveness and a sense of humor are plusses -- and they reward conformity with that archetype. But university administrations love evaluations because they're quantifiable. Never mind that there are all sorts of sample issues and systematic bias against women and minorities.

This is right on. Ezra, you're right that there are tons of academics who don't care about teaching. They have no reason to care about teaching, because at no point in the "becoming an academic" process before hiring - and sometimes not even then - is good teaching rewarded or noticed. But let's be clear what's happening here: good teaching isn't being rewarded; good student evals are. And that's going to systematically shift money to tall attractive well-dressed white guys.

Chalk it up (with VaR and NCLB) as another example of how focusing on single quantifiable measures can be dramatically misleading.

Quick prediction: Teaching may or may not improve at Texas A&M, but student grades will increase significantly, as professors ease up on grading to improve their evaluations. The administration will claim that the increase in GPA's shows the success of the plan.

if A&M were serious it would include a teaching component as part of the tenure decision process instead of creating an incentive for grade inflation

Jesus, do people get a prize for speaking out their ass? First Ezra, now this. Texas A&M, as is readily searchable on their web site (go to tamu.edu search on tenure, second result), *does* in fact have teaching as one of its three main criteria for tenure: teaching, research, and service.

I think that your point is spot on. Even having gone to a top small liberal arts college that touted teaching over research, I found most of the teaching lacking at best. Many of the professors conducted classes where they could have given me a book list and asked for two 25 page papers, and I would have gotten the same fulfillment out of the class without wasting 4 -6 hours a week depending. This got worse after tenure.

This is not to say that tenure should be abolished (it provides important academic protection), but higher education is broken because of the lack of good teaching in major institutions. Having visited "good" classes in a variety of colleges and universities, I would venture to say that the problem is systemic, particularly in the humanities.

Short of dividing university and college faculties into research sections and teaching sections, this seems like an imperfect, but positive, step in the right direction.

I don't know which institution the academics you grew up around were affiliated with, but you are making a generalization based on a very small sample, a sample that, furthermore, is anecdotal. I work at a large major public university that only grants tenure to individuals who do research and publish (as all do) but also demonstrate a commitment to and mastery of teaching. Our largest faculty honors are given to recognize teaching. All tenured faculty must do both and do them pretty well.

And the idea of rewarding teaching based on student evaluations is the most laughable notion I've ever heard. You don't have to teach a damn thing to get a great evaluation. In fact, I'd venture to say, based on my very own experiential anecdotal evidence, that the more you put into setting class perfomance goals and engaging student in learning and meeting objectives, the less likely you are to get the glowing evaluation of a majority of students in your class. A plurality of students aren't all that interested in being challenged in the classroom and quite often resent faculty who expect all students to meet those challenges. It is only later in their lives and careers that most come to value being forced to step up their games in a tough but fair class.

I think you'd see a lot of professors getting that cash based on how easy the class was to slide through, requiring minimal effort but providing high entertainment value.

Um, part-time, adjuncts and graduate assistants do most of the heavy teaching in many institutions, and they are on the lower-than-low -- almost untouchable nether depths of the ranks in terms of prestige.

Perhaps some money and perks (and chances of advancement) ought to be thrown their way Before we give money to tenured profs, whose children already get a "courtesy" of free tuition at numerous colleges besides the ones their parents teach at (amounting to a substantial subsidy). It adds up to a rather ugly caste system, don't you think?

Ezra, could we have some clarification of what you mean by "I have never since met a class of people so contemptuous of teaching "?

My own experience is much more along these lines:

Let's reverse his formulation: Some students want teachers to be more accountable for their teaching. I'd be sympathetic except for one thing: I work with college students. And I have never since met a class of people so contemptuous of learning. You'd think they were being asked to chew mud.

It seems to me, then, that perhaps what you mean with that phrase is what this poster means. I'm working on my Ph.D. right now, and have to teach lower-division classes. They are not fun. There is a distinct and pervasive anti-work ethic among large swathes of students. When they say they 'spent a lot of time' on an assignment, for example, they typically cite a figure of no more than an hour or two(I teach math, btw, to bring the complete set of prejudices to the fore.)

Upper division classes are better, btw, but those first two years can be a real kick in the pants for some students, at least in terms of what was expected of them in high school, and what is expected of them now in college.

Ezra: care to insult any more groups of people based on stereotypes? I hear there is a well-paying category of the genre involving black folks on welfare. If you want to be taken seriously on your blog posts you can start by not posting on things you know little about.

My wife, with her degree in education, found herself at a dinner party hosted by university professors. The table conversation was all about how much their students sucked, they fell asleep in class, never paid attention, did poorly on the tests, etc., ad nauseum.

My wife said, "Have you looked at how you're presenting the information? Students tend to be bored when the information is presented in a way that's a poor fit with their learning style. Maybe if you did some research into how your students learn, you could tailor your teaching to their needs..."

You'd have thought she just took a shit on the table.

Some students want teachers to be more accountable for their teaching. I'd be sympathetic except for one thing: I work with college students. And I have never since met a class of people so contemptuous of learning. You'd think they were being asked to chew mud.

I confess I laughed at this, in part because I taught for many years at an institution much like Texas A&M, and it was true. There were exceptions, of course, some students were a joy, but I had to grudingly agree with one professor who stated that 'education is a good that everyone want to purchase and few want to consume'.

MikeT: Hmm, interesting. Have you considered that they may have been offended because they were professionals who didn't like someone telling them how to do their jobs?

Seriously, congrats to your wife for getting an M.Ed., but that doesn't give her the expertise to critique someone's teaching without seeing people in the classroom. I'd glare too.

"Which is why Texas's maneuver makes sense."

Ezra, Texas A&M should not be referred to as "Texas." "Texas," used in this way, always refers to the University of Texas at Austin, which is a real university and should not be confused with Aggieland.

Let me just speak up here for students who dowongrade faculty members who have accents, having had several college teachers, back in the day, whose statements in the classroom were often so thickly accented as to render them incomprehensible.

tomemos, I wasn't there (it was before we met), and I'm certainly not doing the tale justice, but in her telling it is clear that the gathering was appalled at the suggestion that they tailor their teaching to the needs of their students. And I have no background in education (although I did teach for a year while getting my masters) I feel comfortable saying that if you're teaching a survey course and a significant portion of your students are falling asleep, then there is a problem with your teaching. But I am both less kind and less politic than my wife.

And the fact that I was put into a classroom with no pedagogical training certainly adds to my skepticism of teaching techniques in higher ed.

Total quotes TAMU's "three main criteria for tenure: teaching, research, and service." But the reward system for faculty is based on what they do, not what they say on their website.

I can only speak about A&M tangentially (I know one faculty member), but my experience of research universities from attending two and being married to an academic at another is that the actual criteria for tenure at a research institution is something closer to: research, research, research, not pissing of the department chair, research, research, not pissing off any of the other full professors, research, research, not making waves, research, service (on department committees and other scut work for the university), research, and teaching. And, at least in the sciences and engineering, for "research" read: "collecting research grants"). I exaggerate a little bit, but its pretty rare at a research university for an excellent teacher with poor research to get tenure, and the opposite happens all the time. So which one would you choose to focus on?

Clearly A&M knows all this, though. In the end, I completely agree with the poster who said this was all about "APPEARING to be doing something to improve teaching"

1. At research institutions, research is decisive--that shouldn't be a surprise. You won't get tenure, no matter how good your teaching evaluations are, if the research isn't there. In the sciences, that includes getting grants, because a scientist -- other than, perhaps, a pure theorist -- who doesn't get money can't do research.

2. It does not follow that teaching will be regarded with contempt at every research institution. Whether it is depends on institutional culture, and that varies from one institution to another. In my experience it varies a great deal. Anecdotal evidence is in this case even less probative than it usually is. It is tendentious to say that "professors don't teach well" in general. Where's the evidence?

Even if the incentives for an individual to teach well are slight, departments may have an interest in teaching well (or at least in maintaining enrollments). TA funding and the availability of slots may depend on enrollments or on the number of majors. The directness of that relation depends on the administration, but the important thing to note is that the "structure of the rewards system" goes beyond what matters for tenure and promotion.

Whether teaching matters also varies enormously with discipline. In the sciences the incentives to research are overwhelming, those to teaching are small. Individual departments may have an ethos of good teaching, but that is incidental to their function. In the humanities, teaching is usually weighted more heavily; a mathematics department may tenure a brilliant mathematician who teaches badly (and protect itself by confining this person to graduate teaching), but I have never known a humanities department to ignore teaching altogether in favor of brilliance on the research side.

3. Student evaluations are systematically biased in all sorts of ways. In addition to the biases already mentioned, bigger classes, for example, tend to yield lower evaluations than small classes. If Texas A&M wants their prize money to have the greatest effect on the quality of teaching, they should restrict the award to those who teach basic courses (in English, composition; in math, calculus). That's where students learn either to love or to hate writing, math, etc. As it happens, those courses, which are often large and anonymous, are the most difficult to teach well and to get topnotch evaluations in. There would be not only practical benefit, but also some justice in weighting the awards in favor of those who teach them.

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