Satire: Colby's approach to evaluation
One of the ironies of the tenure process at Colby is that its dominating goal
is to ensure that the college faculty is populated with outstanding
and exceptional teachers, and in fact it is a subset of these "best of the
best" who form the Promotion and Tenure Committee to make one of the most
important decisions about your career. And yet there is apparently very
little transfer of these educational skills to the tenure mentoring and
evaluation processes.
Among other things, effective teachers must make their expectations and
evaluation guidelines clear and consistent. They must provide frequent,
accurate, and consistent feedback. They must be transparent about what
the requirements are to succeed in class. The must be proactive and
informative in mentoring the students to give them the best possible chance to
master the necessary skills and material. The feedback from assignments
during the semester must provide a timely and accurate monitor on the
student's progress in the course, and should be a good indicator of the type
of final grade the student will ultimately receive.
But it appears not to bother the bulk of the Colby faculty that none
of these features of good teaching and evaluation are found in Colby's
tenure processes and procedures.
If Colby professors evaluated their students the way they evaluate
tenure candidates, a course syllabus might look something like this:
Course Title:
Specific knowledge about many interesting things
Course Content:
This course will provide you with specific knowledge about many
interesting things. Successful students in this course will demonstrate a
mastery of that knowledge. However, I will not include in this syllabus
a list of specific topic areas for which you will be responsible, and
I will also not be breaking the course material into "topics" during
class. The idea of an explicit set of "topics" would mislead you into
thinking that this material can be quantified into independent units.
Additionally, listing such specific topic areas might mislead you into
thinking that those particular areas are what you are responsible for
knowing when you are doing your coursework. If I were to provide you
with a list of specific topic areas in which you must excel, that would
hamper my ability to be flexible in my grading, taking your whole record
into account. Therefore, instead of focusing on particular topics,
you must consider yourself responsible for any material that I might
choose to use in my evaluation.
Evaluation:
The grade you will receive in this course will be either a Pass or
a Fail. In order to pass the course, you must demonstrate a mastery of
the course material.
During the course of the semester you will be required to complete
various assignments, projects, and tests, as well as to participate
in class discussion. Periodically I will give you written summaries
of your general progress in the course, but you should not take these
summaries as any kind of guarantee or suggestion about what you will
receive for a final grade. These summaries are merely informal feedback
on your progress. I could not possibly do a complete evaluation of your
performance in class until I am able to examine your entire record in
context at the end of the semester. However, you should feel free to use
any other resources, including your fellow students, to gather rumors and
innuendo about the various criteria I may use in your final evaluation.
Grading:
It is very important to me to be able to look at the whole picture when
determining your final grade, and it would be inappropriate for me to
try to give you definitive feedback on your progress during the semester.
Therefore, you will not receive letter grades or pass-fail marks on any
of your course work. I will grade the assignments, assign numerical
grades, include comments, and return the graded assignments to you.
You should take care not to assume that the numerical grades serve as
any specific indicator of your progress in the course. They are merely
checkpoints for your own information, and will ultimately be compared
to the numerical grades of other students who have recently passed this
course. I cannot quantify the numercial grade levels or tell you what
numercial grades you should try to achieve, because that would hamper my
ability to look at the whole picture in my final evaluation of your work.
Additionally, any information about the numerical scores of students
who recently passed this course is confidentifal.
Completing the course:
When the semester is over, all your coursework and my mid-term assessments
will be given to a small committee of students who have taken and passed
this course in the past. After examining your work, the committee will
recommend to me whether you should pass or fail. Their primary criterion
for the recommendation will be to compare your work to the work of other
students who have recently passed this course. If your work is at least
as good as the work of the most recent students, they will recommend
that you pass the course. I will not allow this committee to examine
the work of previous students, however, because that would violate the
confidentiality of those students. I will also not give the committee
any specific instructions about how to evaluate and compare your work,
because that would hamper their ability to be appropriately flexible
and subjective in their evaluations. However, I will assure you that
the committee takes its job very seriously and will do an excellent job
of reviewing your work.
Problems?
We are all human, and there is always the possibility for error (however
slim) in the evaluation process. However, the ability for me to be
as flexible and candid as possible in my evaluation of your course
performance far outweighs any potential for error in the subjective
evaluation processes. If you can demonstrate that I or the student
evaluation committee have not followed the letter of the evaluation
methods specified above then we will be glad to have another meeting to
talk about your grade (keeping in mind that the committee will be busy
with their own end-of-semester activities and have no personal stake in
changing their minds).
However, possible errors in judgment cannot be addressed. The student
committee needs to be able to use its judgment candidly and subjectively,
in order to be as flexible as possible in recommending your final grade.
Additionally, their proceedings are secret, so you really cannot make
any persuasive argument that their judgment may have been poor. You do
not have all the material and contextual information that they have.
In any event, I can assure you that the student committee works extremely
hard to produce fair evaluations given the information I provide them
(including the recent student material that I cannot show them and the
specific evaluation instructions that I do not give them). If there are
occasional errors, we can live with that. It's just a grade, after all.
If you disagree with the final grade, I will be happy to talk about it
with you. But there is no mechanism for changing it, so you might just
want to save your breath.
Good luck! And have a stress-free semester!!
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