Tag Archives: college & university

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and playing Portal

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Erving Goffman’s 1959 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a sociological classic. “Portal” is a video game that has received good reviews (90 out of 100 at MetaCritic.com). How could they fit together?

According to a story at Mashable.com, they are both part of some sections of a required Freshman course at Wabash College in Indiana:

The game will be part of a mandatory Freshman seminar called “Enduring Questions” that will explore “fundamental questions of humanity” through “classical and contemporary works.” A theater professor named Michael Abbott is among the faculty members designing the course.

Inspired by a game theory article drawing comparisons between Portal and Erving Goffman’s 1959 sociology text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Abbott nominated Portal as one of the works that students would be required to experience and discuss to pass the class.

He demonstrated the game for his non-gaming colleagues and was pleased to find that they appreciated and approved the plan to assign Goffman’s text and follow it up with “a collective playthrough of Portal.”

I haven’t played Portal but this sounds like an intriguing combination. I wonder how many college classes today include video games…

Determining the best colleges…using RateMyProfessor.com?

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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

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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

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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

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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.

College students and studying

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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

An argument against tenure

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Megan McArdle of The Atlantic makes an argument for getting rid of tenure and concludes, “I find it hard to believe that tenure is crucial to preserving the spirit of free inquiry at our nation’s colleges.”

I’d like to see someone produce a thoughtful rebutal to hear the other side.

h/t Instapundit

Elite college admission practices

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Last year, two Princeton sociologists (T.J. Espenshade and A.W. Radford) published a book titled No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. The book has drawn a number of comments in the blogosphere.

The book was mentioned in the New York Times this past Sunday as Ross Douthat wrote about “the roots of white anxiety.” Douthat summarizes the book’s findings:

Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

According to Douthat, these decisions have consequences: “This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike” and “Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland.”

Granted, this study was restricted to eight elite universities. But many Americans have an image of liberal academia that bears little relation to average lives of shopping at Wal-Mart, living in suburbia, and going to church.

Discussing academic cheating

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The New York Times holds a discussion about the epidemic of cheating that includes two teachers (one college, one high school) and a recent college graduate. Interesting perspectives.

More from the college professor in the discussion at The Chronicle of Higher Education.