Academia
drorzel | May 31, 2007Over at evolgen, RPM is indignant about being rated by students, citing some pig-ignorant comments from RateMyProfessors. Interestingly, someone brought this up to the Dean Dad a little while ago, and he had an interesting response:
A reader wrote to ask a dean's-eye perspective on ratemyprofessors.com.
The short version: I consider it electronic gossip.
The slightly longer version: I've had enough social science training to know that small, self-selected samples lead to skewed outcomes.
The long version: and yet, from what I've seen, the ratings usually aren't that far off. Which is…
jstemwedel | May 29, 2007Having finished grading (yea, having submitted the final grades themselves), I attempt to resurface from my cave.
It's really rather bright out here!
Anyway, as you will have deduced from my last post, there was a commencement-sized break in my grading activities on Saturday. The commencement speaker, Google senior vice president of global sales and business development Omid Kordestani, gave a nice address to the grads and their guests, so I'm reporting on his big points here.
Kordestani couched his remarks in terms of a set of "Aha!" moments he has had in his own life, and the lessons he…
catdynamics | May 29, 2007The good thing about having semi-permanent outposts in alternative jurisdiction is you get so much more freedom in personnel matters
The WPSU base has some useful amenities for faculty
drorzel | May 29, 2007There's a nice article in Inside Higher Ed today by a faculty member suddenly working in admissions:
Whole sections of the admissions and recruitment process might not even be part of the division of academic affairs, but part of an enrollment services division, staffed by people who are experts in marketing, admissions, financial aid and more conversant in "yield management" than in the language of academia. Faculty often talk about admissions, financial aid, and recruiting, but rarely run across or seek out the people responsible, and are not often involved enough in the process to…
evolgen | May 29, 2007Amongst the other TAs and the lab coordinators in my department, I have a reputation of being a tough grader. At the end of the semester, when the course admins calculate grades, my students invariably get a few points added to their lab scores -- this is done to bring lab scores more in line with lecture exam scores. Does that mean I'm a bad teacher who doesn't explain the material well enough, but grades as if it were explained clearly? Or do I explain the material perfectly fine, but expect too much from my students?
Because I'm such a hard-ass, I often get complaints from my students --…
jstemwedel | May 26, 2007
Ahem.
Beach ball here! Kids, I'm not going to march myself into the stadium!
That's better. Thanks dude!
The pomp! The circumstance!
How long is this supposed to take?
Well, the people on the podium giving the speeches won't mind if we entertain ourselves.
Whee!
Just keep it under control or else --
Uh, you're kind of young to be a graduate, aren't you?
Can I go home with you?
voltagegate | May 26, 2007My undergrad degree will be officially complete this afternoon. I walk with honors and a BS in biology and writing. It's a big day for me and my family, despite my general distaste for pomp and circumstance (literally in this case); I tentatively returned to college after getting fed up with the hospitality industry (and Annapolis, MD), worked full time and took as many credits as I could. It has taken me a bit longer than the traditional student, but I'm in no hurry at 28. If I was, perhaps this blog may never have been started. Perhaps a lot of things wouldn't be as sweet as they are today…
catdynamics | May 25, 2007 Tenure doesn't help you if you are dead - not funny, actually.
Advice for junior faculty at a research university
Chad started it
sb admin | May 25, 2007Chad just posted a bit of pre-tenure advice, including the very important advice to take all advice with a grain of salt. I would say that also applies to the rest of his advice, because I'm about to post contradictory advice. You should also take my advice with a grain of salt. Be aware that it comes from somebody who has been beaten into being very cynical about the system. On the other hand, you can learn from my mistakes.
My advice here is specifically for faculty at a research University, most specifically Vanderbilt. It's primarily for physics and astronomy (indeed, primarily the…
catdynamics | May 25, 2007PSU and xPSU folks:
FYI - heard from Joe P. last night.
He is ok, his platoon took some casualties though.
drorzel | May 25, 2007Something old, something new, on the topic near and dear to every academic.
The old is a post by Doug Natelson from a couple of weeks ago, giving advice on how to get tenure, as a response to the recent flurry of tenure discussions on science blogs.
The new is an article by Lesboprof at Inside Higher Ed, giving advice on how to get tenure, in the wake of passing her own tenure review. She's pseudonymous (obviously) and cagey about her research field, but what's striking is how consistent the advice is between the two. And it's excellent advice, so if you're starting out on the tenure track,…
jstemwedel | May 24, 2007This post brought to you by my intense desire to avoid grading any more papers.
More than a dozen years ago, when I earned my Ph.D. in chemistry, I made what many at the time viewed as a financially reckless decision and purchased academic regalia rather than just renting it.
At the time, there was apparently just one company who even made the regalia for the university from which I earned my degree. Given their monopoly, they could charge a bundle -- almost $600 -- for the gown, hood, and mortarboard. (Despite the price, I would also argue that the uniform still needed modifications to be…
jstemwedel | May 23, 2007Because I am engaged in a struggle with mass quantities of grading, I'm reviving a post from the vault to tide you over. I have added some new details in square brackets, and as always, I welcome your insight here.
I just got back [in Octiber of 2005] from talking with an outside evaluator about the federally funded training grant project at my university that tries to get more of our students to graduate school in science. The evaluator is here not at the behest of the funding agency, but rather at the request of the science professor here who oversees the program. Because, you know, he…
drorzel | May 23, 2007Matthew Yglesias has a couple of posts on opposition to the US News college rankings, the first noting the phenomenon, and the second pointing to Kevin Carey's work on better ranking methods. The problem with this is, I think he sort of misses the point of the objections.
Matt writes:
All that said, the very best way to deal a death-blow to this scheme would be for America's colleges and universities to work together and with third parties to try to come up with some meaningful metrics for higher education performance. All magazines make lists, but the reason the college rankings are such a…
jstemwedel | May 21, 2007I used to think what I really needed this time of semester was elves.
When the term papers and final exams and case studies and research reports were in their stacks on my desk, casting shadows on my prospects of getting any other substantial projects done, I'd think, "Wouldn't it be nice if I could just leave these papers on my desk with a box of red pens, and have elves come at night and grade them? It would be like a fairy tale ..."
But seriously, knowing fairy-tale elves, there would be some trick. Sure, they'd grade the papers, but then they'd take my tenure dossier until I could guess…
drorzel | May 19, 2007Eductaion reform is a contentious topic, and everybody has their own ideas about the best ways to improve the teaching of basic skills. Some people favor a "whole language" approach, others think we should go back to teaching phonics and memorizing grammar rules. I've heard people speak of "diagramming sentences" as absolutely the worst idea ever, while others think it's the key element missing from our students' preparation.
It take a real outside-the-box thinker like Ann Althouse to suggest that the silver bulet is to eliminate fiction reading from schools:
And why does reading even need to…
drorzel | May 18, 2007I'm mired in lab grading at the moment, which is sufficiently irritating that I usually have to decamp to someplace with no Internet access, or else I spend the day blogrolling instead. Or, really, just hitting "Refresh" over and over on Bloglines, hoping that somebody in my RSS subscriptions has posted something new.
A big part of the problem is that a large number of people have a badly mistaken view of science writing. I'm not sure where they get this from-- the first-year students in the intro course already have a fully developed case, but many of them claim not to have written lab…
jstemwedel | May 17, 2007I hope you've noticed that Seed has sent a team to blog the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair currently raging in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I love science fairs. I've judged them (and recruited others to judge them). At our county fair, I'm always sucked right into the science-fair-type exhibits entered by kids in the Young California exhibit hall.
And of course, as a kid, I did projects for our school science fair.
Actually, it was officially a "curriculum fair" rather than a science fair. Why? Was science too scary an area even for the fifth and sixth grade teachers to…
clock | May 17, 2007Business customers and children can be tough to manage online, but can you imagine managing scientists! They are already hard enough to satisfy in their native environment offline (e.g., to look beyond the usual metrics when awarding tenure). I know, I am making links in this post so cryptic, you'll just have to click to see what on Earth I am talking about and make your own connections...
jstemwedel | May 17, 2007Someone forgot to tell our department photocopier that finals started today; rather than being a vengeful photocopier toying with the pitiful mortals in its thrall, it was a happy photocopier that photocopied my final exams beautifully. And since I wasn't clearing any cryptic paper jams, my mind wandered into the question of how others approach final exams:
Multiple choice, essay, something in between, or a combination of question formats?
Scantron forms? Blue books? (If so, do the students have to buy them or does the prof provide them?)
In-class or take-home?
Open book or closed book?…