Professors Aren’t Trying to Ruin Student’s Lives

Art Carden’s Forbes piece, quoted in full (I’ve added the emphasis in bold):

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13:11 (KJV)

One of the popular myths of higher education is that professors are sadists who live to inflict psychological trauma on undergraduates. Perhaps you believe that we pick students at random and then schedule all our assignments in such a way as to make those students’ lives as difficult as possible. The older I get and the longer I do this, the more I recognize that we (the professors) need to be more transparent about our philosophies of evaluation. How does this work? Let’s clarify a few things.

First, I do not “take off” points. You earn them. The difference is not merely rhetorical, nor is it trivial. In other words, you start with zero points and earn your way to a grade. You earn a grade in (say) Econ 100 for demonstrating that you have gained a degree of competence in economics ranging from being able to articulate the basic principles (enough to earn a C) to mastery and the ability to apply these principles to day-to-day affairs (which will earn an A). I’ve hurt my own grades before by confusing my own incompetence with competence and my own (bare) competence with mastery, so trust me: I’ve been there, and I understand.

Second, this means that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that you have mastered the material. It is not on me to demonstrate that you have not. My assumption at the beginning of each class is that you know somewhere between nothing and very little about basic economics unless you were lucky enough to have an exceptional high school economics course. Otherwise, why are you here? You might say that the course is a prerequisite for other things you want to do, but if that it is the case and you know the material, you’re more than welcome to simply show up for the exams, ace them, and be on your way.

In this light, consider this: the fact that you “don’t understand” why you didn’t earn full points for a particular question might itself help explain why you didn’t earn full points. Don’t take this personally or interpret it as a sneer. See it as a learning opportunity. If you understood the material–and do note that there is a large difference between really understanding the material and being able to reproduce a graph or definition you might remember from class–you would have answered the question flawlessly. I recommend (as I have recommended to many others) that you go back, take another crack at it, and see if you can find where you have gone wrong. Then bring it by my office, and we will talk.

Finally, I’m here to be a mentor and instructor. This means that our relationship differs from the relationships that you have with your friends and family. Please don’t infer from this that I don’t care about you, because I do. A lot. I want to see you make good choices. I want to see you understand basic economics because I hope it will rock your world as it continues to rock mine and because the human consequences of lousy economic policy are enormous. That said, you should never take grades personally. I don’t think you’re stupid because you tank an exam, an assignment, or even an entire course. Economics is hard. A D or an F on an economics exam does not diminish your value in God’s eyes (or in mine) or indicate that economics just isn’t for you. It probably means you need to work smarter, and I’m here to help you with that.

Dear student, I once thought as you do. I once carried about the same misconceptions, the same litany of cognitive biases, and the same adolescent desire to blame others for my errors. I was (and remain) very poorly served by my immaturity. As shocking as it may seem, I still cling to a lot of it, even after four years of college, five years of graduate school, and now five-and-a-half years as a professor. Economics is hard, but becoming a responsible member of a free society is very, very, very hard. I’m still learning to put aside childish things. I hope you will do the same. Start now. The effort is daunting, but the rewards are substantial.

At my school, student evaluations are just about the only thing that counts towards LRT. We work on 5 point scale (1 is the lowest), and it’s become increasingly common for students to give 1’s on their student evaluations.

I can only speak for myself, but last Fall I put all of my evaluation numbers — about 80 classes over 11 years — into a spreadsheet and started running pivot tables. I had one class where I taught two sections, and had a majority of ones and twos in one of them, and a majority of fours and fives in the other section. Ya’ know … that makes me just about certain that it isn’t me or the material that is leading to those evaluations, but rather biases and perceptions that the students brought with them.

And, just this past week, we were sitting around the break room discussing the increasing use of the word “incompetent” in students’ written evaluations. In particular, one colleague of mine was described as incompetent: he had 30 years of professional experience in one industry, then got a Ph.D. in that industry, then started our program geared towards that industry, and has gotten teaching awards since coming to SUU. The disconnection from reality of such a student is nothing short of stunning. And this is in a class that has rotated through 4 faculty members in 4 years because no one wants to add the lousy evaluations from it to their portfolio.

I’m done now …

Via Greg Mankiw. Whew. At least my students didn’t walk out of class to go join Occupy Wall Street, and then have their fellow travelers in the legacy media trumpet the fact nationally.

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Comments

[Kit Lloyd]

The measure of the quality of a class (and its professor) can be determined in part by how a student describes the eventual grade they received. There are classes where "I got an 'A'", but remember having to put in relatively little effort. Then there are others, including the three I took from you, where I feel "I earned an 'A'" (or "B", as the case may be...). I wish I could say that I remember all the equations and causal relationships between variables, but mostly I remember the skill to critically break down an argument, and objectively evaluate it. It's the primary reason I still visit your blog, even after graduation.

I also appreciate your sense of humor =).

[Kit Lloyd]

Btw, your style of testing (the periodic "Buffet") was the best I've ever seen. It's probably more work than the traditional way, but it gives the student a chance to "earn" the grade without getting penalized for a bad day.

[Dave Tufte]

Thanks for your comments Kit, but I was only thinking about me in the parts I marked in bold.

The example I gave from my evaluations is merely reflecting the data that I have available. What concerns me most is the compulsive use of means for what is ordinal/quantitative data where the use of the mean isn't appropriate. What administrators ought to be doing is using the spread in the data that is possible in situations like I described to characterize the scope of what is normal. This is statistically acceptable. What is not statistically acceptable, and what is in fact done out of widespread innumeracy, is averaging of quantitative scores from multiple classes and then comparison to some threshold of acceptability. This is pushed by administration, even though it puts all the power in the hands of the handful of students who don't routinely give their professors 4's and 5's.

The overarching concern here is mostly the increasing heartache of the people I work with. We all have stringers of former students like you who "get it". Those alumni are the heart and soul of a school's future, and their input is sacrificed to short-sighted administrative focus on enrollment.

[Dave Tufte]

That exam system you like so much may go the way of the dodo.

Students have come to expect me to do it (and give me no credit for it). Yet, they increasingly expect me to both allow them to do this, and give them individualized make-up exams. When the complaints about not giving make-ups become common enough, that system will have to go because it's infeasible to do both.