Category Archives: Colleges and Universities

Determining the best colleges…using RateMyProfessor.com?

Posted on by

Forbes recent published another installment of their rankings of the best colleges in America. One of the question that arises with such a list is the methodology behind the rankings. To their credit, Forbes provides a lengthy explanation.

Even as the ranking is supposedly from the point of view of students, I initially had some questions about one of the major criteria which accounts for 17.5% of the score for a college: using student evaluations of professors at RateMyProfessor.com. At first, this sounded crazy to me – how representative is the data from RateMyProfessors.com and does it accurately reflect what is going on in the classroom?

Forbes sums up why they used this data:

In spite of some drawbacks of student evaluations of teaching, they apparently have value for the 86% of schools that have some sort of internal evaluation system. RMP ratings give similar results to these systems. Moreover, they are a measure of consumer preferences, which is what is critically important in rational consumer choice. When combined with the significant advantages of being uniform across different schools, not being subject to easy manipulation by schools, and being publicly available, RMP data is a preferred data source for information on student evaluations of teaching–it is the largest single uniform data set we know of student perceptions of the quality of their instruction.

To recap why these used data from RateMyProfessors.com:

1. RMP ratings are similar to evaluation scores gathered by colleges. There is some scholarly research to back this up.

2. RMP ratings are “a measure of consumer preference.” This is data generated voluntarily by students. If Forbes wants the students’ perspective, this website offers it. (Though it is still a question whether it is a representative measure – but point #1 may take care of that.)

3. RMP ratings are perhaps the only data source to answer the question of what students experience in the classroom. It may not be perfect data but it can be used as an approximation.

Overall, Forbes logic makes some sense: RateMyProfessor.com offers a unique dataset that when cleaned up (and they describe how they weighted and standardized the scores) offers some insights into the classroom experience.

However, I’m still leery of giving 17.5% of the total score over to RateMyProfessor.com evaluations. Perhaps the scholarly literature will continue to examine this website and determine the value of its ratings. And you can see that Forbes is tweaking their measurements: the 2009 methodology explanation has some differences and the RateMyProfessor.com score then counted for 25% of the total score (compared to 17.5% in the 2010 edition).

The attractiveness of professors

Posted on by

The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at how the attractiveness of professors affects their career. Some of the highlights of the article:

Research shows that attractive people do better in life. They are treated better by teachers, doctors, even strangers, and are more likely to be hired and promoted than those who are less attractive. But in academe, being hot has a downside: Professors who are considered too good-looking can be cast by their peers as lightweights, known less for their productivity than for their pulchritude…

Although research shows that students give better teaching evaluations to professors they think are attractive, good looks can also be a burden in the classroom.

An interesting factor to keep in mind when assessing student evaluations.

Argument over Title IX ruling

Posted on by

Two articles at ESPN.com debate the merits of Title IX after a recent court decision regarding the act at Quinnipiac University. While the court case was about the school inflating the number of female athletes in order to show parity in male and female sports programs, Gregg Easterbrook (a journalist/pundit) and Nancy Hogshead-Makar (law professor and “senior director of advocacy for the Women’s Sports Foundation”) debate the necessity of Title IX.

1. Easterbrook argues that the rule allows the government to intervene in situations where it should not. While Title IX was initially necessary to help women’s sports get the recognition they deserved, it is unnecessary today. In the case at hand, the court was left deciding whether playing volleyball was a “civil right” and whether the school could add a competitive cheer team. Easterbrook says, “The issue is whether Title IX has run amok.”

2. Hogshead-Makar argues that Title IX is still necessary as women’s college sports attract smaller “scholarships, budgets, coaching salaries, facilities and competitive opportunities” compared to male sports, male sports are larger at the high school level, schools in addition to Quinnipiac are miscounting female athletes in order to appear compliant, and Title IX has widespread public support (80% according to one poll).

Divergent perspectives on a legal act that affects many college students.

Bill Gates suggests a change is coming in higher education

Posted on by

Bill Gates made a prediction about the future of higher education at a conference last Friday. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Gates’ comments:

“Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university,” he argued at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif. “College, except for the parties, needs to be less place-based.”

Gates went on to argue for a need to lower higher education costs and make such education more widely available. Also at the conference, Nicholas Negroponte claimed e-books will replace printed books  in five years.

There are clearly benefits to having class in-person but the rising cost of higher education will put pressure on schools to offer more Internet based classes.

Taking Project Runway to the classroom

Posted on by

With school starting up soon and professors and teachers lookin for new ways to present material, Time suggests modeling class after Project Runway.

In the spring issue of Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Brad van Eeden-Moorefield, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Central Michigan University, presents the results of his 2006 study on the effects of modeling a research-methods class after Project Runway. The show that just began its eighth season makes budding fashion designers vie for a grand prize by competing in weekly challenges. And though it’s hard to imagine a realm farther removed from the sexy world of fashion than a small-town campus in sleepy Mount Pleasant, Mich., van Eeden-Moorefield’s Project M (the M is for Methodology) proved successful. By the end of the semester, 100% of the students said they thought the curriculum should be used in future classes. They reported being more invested and also retaining more material. And perhaps most important, they said they actually had fun in a class in which students are trained to write theses, academic papers and similarly mind-numbing (but necessary) stuff.

According to the article, a few reasons this works in the classroom: competition, making material more relatable by using popular culture, and interactive criticism.

h/t Instapundit

Plagiarism in the Internet age

Posted on by

The New York Times reports on how getting information from the Internet has changed students’ perceptions about plagiarism:

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

Anthropologist Susan D. Blum studied students at the University of Notre Dame and came to this conclusion regarding attitudes toward authorship:

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

If so, this is an interesting change. It suggests the concept of individualism is changing from one where a person develops unique ideas to one where individuals are creative with existing material.

Perhaps this generation tends to think information on the Internet (and other creative material) is common knowledge. One traditional rule about avoiding plagiarism has to do with common knowledge; if it is widely known, then no citation is needed. What is being confused then is the ease in which the information can be obtained versus whether it has an author. It is true that it is often easy to do an Internet search and find something out. That does not mean that the information is known to all – easy access does not equal common knowledge.

It seems like the best course would be for students to cite all external sources, even if a student thinks it is common knowledge.

Bleak job market in sociology and other disciplines

Posted on by

The job market in sociology is down quite a bit in recent years, according to a report from the American Sociological Association. The results are reported in Inside Higher Ed:

An association report issued Friday shows a 35 percent decline in the number of academic job postings in its job bank between 2008 and 2009, and that drop follows a 23 percent drop between 2006 and 2008, the year that the economic downturn started in full. (While not all sociology jobs are listed with the association, the job bank is a good proxy for the overall market, especially for tenure-track positions.)

While the report holds out hope for coming years, this will be tied to the fate of universities and colleges in general, which are then dependent on the overall economy. If certain pundits are right, such as Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, in suggesting that we may be on the verge of a higher education bubble, the job market could be tight for a while.

Ending summer vacation

Posted on by

Time makes an argument for ending the typical American summer vacation from school. Numerous studies indicate that children lose ground during the summer and low-income students lose a lot of ground:

And what starts as a hiccup in a 6-year-old’s education can be a crisis by the time that child reaches high school. A major study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University concluded that while students made similar progress during the school year, regardless of economic status, the better-off kids held steady or continued to advance during the summer — while disadvantaged students fell back. By the end of grammar school, low-income students had fallen nearly three grade levels behind. By ninth grade, roughly two-thirds of the learning gap separating income groups could be blamed on summer learning loss.
The article also mentions the romanticism linked with summer vacation: trips, outdoor activity, freedom. This seems particularly crucial for American teenagerdom when teenagers get a first taste of being away from their parents. Even though I really liked school, I did enjoy summer vacation and all the options that were available to me (which not everyone has).
Would it be too difficult to split the summer vacation into two sections of about a month or a month and a half long? This seems like a reasonable compromise: some time off for everyone, shorter gaps for students to lose knowledge.

College students and studying

Posted on by

Boston.com reports on a study by two professors that found college students study less today: 14 hours a week on average today compared to 24 hours a week on average in 1961. Why this is happening is less clear:

But when it comes to “why,” the answers are less clear. The easy culprits — the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what’s a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses — don’t appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found. What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors’ unwillingness to challenge them.

Whatever the reason, one thing is clear: The central bargain of a college education — that students have fairly light classloads because they’re independent enough to be learning outside the classroom — can no longer be taken for granted. And some institutions of higher learning have yet to grapple with, or even accept, the possibility that something dramatic has happened.

Very interesting findings and something that colleges and universities will have to adjust to.

The Atlantic chimes in with 8 reasons that may explain why studying is down.

h/t Arts & Letters Daily