59
Student feedback can sometime be a difficult thing for a teacher, and it is sometimes inappropriate that teaching quality is measured in terms of student feedback.
Let me explain this by means of anecdotes. Imagine a colleague who is a good performer, much as a stand-up comedy act. They give good jokes, tell stories, show interesting films. How would many ...
41
It would be unethical for a professor to publish something written by students under the professor’s name without express consent (which is to be given free of any coercive pressure) and coauthorship for the student. (See this recent discussion on a related type of abuse.)
It would also be self defeating and something that no competent professor I’ve met ...
32
Even despite repeated reminders, exams can be a tense time. Some students may honestly forget, and it would be overly harsh to deny them their exam for this. OTOH, some students may do this deliberately as a way to game the system for a little more time, and that should be discouraged.
I'm not sure you have the authority to completely address this on your ...
23
I'm aware of a variant of this: the same course is given by two different instructors in back to back terms; one of the instructor is "hard" and tenured, the other is "soft" and a sessional. Over the years the students have increasingly avoided the class of one to the benefit of the other.
Maybe this quote from Daniel Webster is ...
23
In a similar situation, I have held time at the beginning of the exam to fill out the needed information. Once everyone is there, tell them to start writing their names on the test. You can see them all paging through the test quickly. Have them close their test and put their pencils down when they're done, and let everyone start the test when everyone's ...
21
I have several personal experiences to add to others here.
I was one of four graduate students in George Mackey's course who volunteered to take complete notes. He then used those to write a book. We were thanked in the acknowledgments. I learned a lot. See The Mathematical Theory of Quantum Mechanics.
Once when I decided to write a text after teaching a ...
20
You say:
My lectures contain a lot of mathematical equations and require deep knowledge in Algebra. I tried to make them as easy as possible and even made extra videos to explain parts which I felt were difficult. I checked all available lectures to make sure I explain well. Therefore, I find my lectures among the most intuitive and informative ones.
You ...
18
Marks are a measurement of how well the student knows the subject. So it depends on how much of a lack of knowledge that mistake represents:
in most cases, if all steps are correct and only a number was copied wrongly, then obviously the knowledge of the subject is very good, and most of the question was done correctly, so "almost full marks" are ...
19
At the end of the exam time, tell everyone "pencils down".
Once everyone is still with pencils down, announce "You have 1 minute to write your name (and other information) on each and every page of your exam. If your name and class isn't on your exam at the end of this minute, your exam will still be collected without your name on it, and you ...
14
Student perceptions are perfectly credible viewed from their own perspective. But they may not have universal validity.
Yes, you are suffering from the comparison with the other instructor based on the difference in difficulty of the material as perceived by the students. I suspect the exercises you give are also harder for them. Hopefully others will ...
10
how informative is this evaluation to me?
The information you got is that students think your lectures are "difficult" and "bad." This is not informative.
I suspect your real question is: "How do I get useful student feedback?" which is a very broad question.
Some starting points are:
Identify learning objectives.
Form a ...
11
At my university, we are so fed-up with this attitude that we are working on a system of stickers with a unique-use student identification number that each student would paste on her or his exam sheet at the time the proctors check for identification, signing a double of that sticker as a proof of taking part in the exam. This would furthermore ensure ...
9
There is plentiful research to show that student evaluations are not a good way to measure the quality of teaching. See for example Clayson, 2008. That doesn't mean they are completely useless however. I am lucky that my department doesn't use teaching evals in our annual appraisal. I use evals in two ways: I look to explain a large difference in scores ...
8
This is the online version of the flipped classroom, of course. But, I suspect that a lot of your students aren't familiar with the concept or how to behave. Like most everything else, you need to teach them what their responsibilities are. Probably they are most used to being "told things" and then working on their own. But that won't work here.
...
7
As you collect the exams, if you encounter a student who forgot to write their name, tell them to wait and not write anything on their paper until you've collected the other exams. Once you've collected all the other exams, most of the students can leave, and the remaining students can fill in their names as you watch. This way,
you avoid appearing like you'...
6
There are a couple of issues, but, assuming that students don't volunteer and aren't paid, the most important consideration is whether it has an "educational" purpose or not. As you state it, it sounds like you think it doesn't, but I've required my students to take notes, though not for my own use. In fact I've required them to give me back (...
6
What I usually do (the usefulness depends on the room layout and the number of students) is to tell the students to give the exam to the right so that the rightmost student has all the exams. Then the rightmost students should come forward and give me the exams. This makes the collecting process rather quick amd in my experience, people have "too many ...
5
You indeed need to master the topic that you will teach. So before each lecture, you need to make sure that you master the content to be able to teach it and to answer potential questions from students.
Having said that, you still have some control over the content that you teach during each lecture and how you teach it. Thus, you can sometimes select some ...
5
Whatever it says in your pre-written markscheme. If you don't have one, the UK GCSE one is a fairly reasonable starting point:
Misread or miscopy
Students often copy values from a question incorrectly. If the examiner thinks that the student has made a
genuine misread, then only the accuracy marks (A or B marks), up to a maximum of 2 marks are penalised.
...
4
I'll answer about where I teach, but I think it is similar in the rest of Italy. Typical amounts of teaching are:
RTD-A 50-70 hours of frontal teaching / year
RTD-B 70-100 hours
Full and associate professor 120-130 hours.
In addition, exams take quite a lot of time. You have to offer the students up to 5-7 opportunities to take each exam each year (yes, ...
4
Here is the solution I am considering for the next sitting. In my university students are required to put their student ID on the table and we go through the room cross-checking them with the attendance list, so I can be quite certain the student ID will be within reach as I am collecting exams. I am thinking of carrying two boxes, one for most students to ...
4
I am surprised that no one has suggested the frame challenge in the already existing 12 answers, so I will do it:
Do not force the students to write their name on every sheet
Students are in time pressure during exams, and having them waste several minutes of exam time doing a task that does not count for exam completion adds stress to the situation. ...
3
I think Buffy has the right of it, when he says that you need more regular coursework submission. For me, interactive classrooms don't work very well because my students are spread out in many time zones right now due to covid, so a few specific suggestions:
Lab attendance grade, or similar. Myself and my TAs hold weekly labs that are spread out at many ...
3
Students are not perfect judges. They are not even impartial. In fact, they are often very, very biased!
Differing motivations. Perhaps they are interested in your course. Or perhaps they are merely satisfying requirements.
Grading. The higher the grade you give them, the more positive their response will be.
Lack of reference point. Students may not have a ...
3
Coming from an undergrad student perspective: I would agree with you and say that course evals are generally of little use (except when they are wayy below the median)
Indeed it's been proven that using methods that improve learning often makes students frustrated and confused while normal lectures make the students learn less but are more enjoyable, more ...
3
It's probably a combination of the entire course being difficult and you taking the difficult topics. The students don't know your lectures are inherently tougher, so they assume you're worse at explaining things.
I'd do 2 things. Look at the previous courses. They may be weaker than you'd assume, or simply terrible. I remember a Computer Programming-II ...
3
Yes, absolutely, it is possible, at least, here in the US. Lots of top schools use teaching faculty for large undergraduate courses, especially in computer science and engineering and a few of them (like me at Michigan) only have a master's.
The rule is you're supposed to have one degree higher than the students you're teaching or a terminal degree, i.e., a ...
2
The short answer is, unless the rubric clearly lays out which kinds of errors merit which level of deduction, it is up to you. I would strongly encourage you to discuss this with whoever is supervising you in this role, as they may have expectations which have not been communicated clearly to you.
Grading, especially without a clear rubric, eventually relies ...
2
I have experienced this in a couple of instances myself. I took a graduate level Natural Language Processing course in my undergraduate, where the professor would have a student, rotating each class, be a scribe for the lecture. This was more of a volunteer thing where a student took notes for a particular lecture and posted them on the discussion board so ...
2
Context always helps me to learn something. By giving the robotics topic first, you provide context on the probability, which makes it less abstract and easier to understand, which is very useful for the practically minded learners.
For the theoretical learners, switching contexts from robotics, to probability and then back to robotics should be easy enough.
...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
