
What If Students Could Fire Their Professors? - ColinWright
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/04/26/401953167/what-if-students-could-fire-their-professors
======
ColinWright
Here's the take-away quotation for me:

    
    
        The better the professors were, as measured by their
        students' grades in later classes, the lower their
        ratings from students.
    
        "If you make your students do well in their academic
        career, you get worse evaluations from your students,"
        Pellizzari said.  Students, by and large, don't enjoy
        learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some
        good.

~~~
Siecje
I don't think that applies at the college/university level.

Evaluations are at the end of the course and you will know if you have learned
a lot.

The problem is profs just reading the textbook or parts of the textbook in a
powerpoint, without challenging students.

~~~
bvrlt
Even at the college/university level I have seen students complaining about
professors that were fairly good, sometimes just because the grading was a bit
tough.

~~~
tr352
Well those might be legitimate complaints. Professor is fine but his grading
is too tough.

~~~
emodendroket
"Too tough" means "I didn't get the grade I wanted." Grade inflation is a real
problem.

~~~
rpcope1
Agreed. When I was teaching before I started out as a developer, it was
unheard of to fail anyone in an entry level Physics class (granted this was an
Ivy League school); over many semesters I recall thinking that we had passed
several students that had no business advancing "because medschool needs high
GPAs" or because we didn't want to ruin some kid's future in engineering (when
they may not have been successful anyways). But yeah many (most?) of the kids
care about a high grade before learning anything, and expect nothing less than
an A, even if they don't deserve it.

------
jmilloy
My undergraduate courses had professor evaluations. Using these evaluations
unilaterally to fire professors is ridiculous, considering the varying
incentives students have, the various reasons that professors end up teaching
the courses they do, the various values that individual professors bring to
university other than teaching, the various ways professors can improve given
the right resources and support, etc.

But there are poor professors who are evaluated poorly by students yet teach
year after year with no improvement. So the problem is that the evaluations
are not being used properly -- by professors and administrators -- to make the
necessary adjustments. Shouldn't we be firing the administrators?

------
chasing
Students and professors are not peers.

A professor has to be able to force a student to do something they don't want
to. "You don't understand this." "You're not doing this right." "You're not
working hard enough to learn what you need to learn in the limited amount of
time we have, here." Etc. A student might find this unpleasant, embarrassing,
or whatever. But that doesn't mean the professor is wrong. Or bad at their
job.

Student evaluations are valuable, of course, but the idea of using them alone
to decide a professor's fate seems incredibly unfair.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Why 'unfair'? Because they're being rated by a person that knows them from
only a few hours exposure a week, in a stilted environment and based on a
narrow context of arcane skills?

Sounds like a student's life. Cry me a river, professor.

~~~
chasing
Students and professors are not peers.

~~~
kefka
The professors should be servants, in the same light a server is to a meal. I
pay for it, I get it the way I want.

~~~
xamuel
That's not a very realistic view of things. First of all, a professor's job
consists of many things, of which teaching is just one. Depending on the
institution, your tuition may be a very miniscule portion of the professor's
paycheck. Finally, even if they're solely a lecturer and payed entirely from
tuition, what you want isn't necessarily what other students want, so unless
you've hired the prof as a private tutor...

~~~
rpcope1
You strike on a significant point that most HN types have no idea about: the
majority of most big schools that do any research (state schools, big private
schools like Ivies) get the majority of their budget from taking a cut of
research grants, and secondarily from state funding and tuitions. At the
various schools I have been involved in different forms with, tuition covers
on;y like 20-40% of operating costs; the people who were really keeping the
university afloat were researchers _not instructors_. It is partially because
of these huge monetary incentives that STEM professors are usually expected to
be researchers (and administrators of grad students) first, and teachers
second: they have to pay the bills.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Iowa gets 5% of its funding from the state, reduced in budget cuts every year
for decades. I honestly don't know why they don't cut their ties - 5% isn't
worth all the Board of Regents interference.

~~~
kefka
Precisely. Ever since Reagan, Public schools are dwindling to Private with a
token appreciation and control from the state.

My parents also told me of a time when one could work a summer job and pay for
the rest of school year. Long are those times gone.

------
HarryHirsch
How will we know that student ire will be directed at the right individuals?
What _are_ the right individuals anyhow? At my department in my beloved state
school there are three full professors, each with no grants, paid USD 120000
for doing no research and giving one bad lecture per semester. Then there are
several lecturers who are paid USD 40000, doing a better job at lecturing, and
more lecturing altogether. We also have half a dozen assistant professors, who
are struggling to bring in grant money and altogether doing an admirable job.

The great majority of the students doesn't know how the sausage is made and
should well keep out of personnel decisions. They don't even know what the
sausage is!

------
fmsf
This would not work, often students perceive strict professors has being bad
because they give too much work load or are too strict. It also goes against
excellent researchers who are contributing a lot to science but are not great
teachers. Often these are "forced" to teach by their university because
otherwise they don't get grants.

I am not in academia, but in retrospective some of my greatest professors
where very hard to deal teachers with huge fail rates. Most students hated
them.

~~~
debacle
I've never had a bad STEM professor who was proficient in English. I don't
know if I've just been lucky or if this is a common misconception about the
role of a teacher versus a professor.

~~~
maw
I think you were lucky. I definitely had some miserable professors and TAs who
were native English speakers. And some professors and TAs with comically bad
English but who were good at what they did anyway.

~~~
debacle
Yeah I had plenty of good ESL professors but I also had a few that, try as I
might, I could not learn from.

------
codefisher
I would like more accountability from professors somehow. Maybe not from
student reviews, but at least someone unknown to the professor randomly attend
a few classes to check the quality of them. Right now I have a professor that
says things during class that are obviously incorrect, and can be verified as
incorrect. Her attitude towards students is also disrespectful. But there is
nothing we can do about it, no way to communicate to the university that they
should be embarrassed and ashamed to have such a professor.

~~~
Fomite
Have you tried to do so? I've seen coherent, well-written letters from a large
number of students influence the direction a course took (it was redesigned
from the ground up for the next year), and both student and peer evaluations
of teaching are definitely a factor in tenure decisions - and depending on the
position, may be a major factor.

But I'd start with laying out concrete things, rather than "embarrassed and
ashamed".

------
calibraxis
What if students could fire the ADMINISTRATORS?

What if students could run the university?

~~~
itsybitsycoder
Honestly, at the school I went to, I would've preferred to have the power to
fire the administration versus the faculty. Most of the faculty are just fine.
Some were great, most had their little quirks and a couple really sucked at
their jobs, but that's true in most fields. The administration seemed to spend
most of their time giving themselves raises and flushing money down toilets.

------
kazinator
Degrees granted from any university that regards students as customers are
automatically worthless junk, because they are essentially purchased goods.

When a professor is rated low, at least some of that rating has to do with the
professor having a high standard in the awarding of grades and passing of
students.

If students get good grades then no matter how much the lectures suck, or how
unavailable that professor is for help and so on, large numbers of those
students will not rate that professor low. Poor grades are the exacerbating
factor in a revolt against a professor.

If you're a C student, the moment you see a B+ next to your student ID on the
course results table, all memories of the prof either vaporize or become rose-
colored.

~~~
ohfunkyeah
Degrees and grades are a big part of the problem because they are treated as
currency to get a job. Degrees are like the Microsoft points system. I want a
job in field XYZ. Well to get that you have to buy 256 credits. But, but, it
looks like the job really only requires 120 credits. Too bad you have to buy
256. Ok, fine... WTF, part of the 120 credits have absolutely no relevance to
the thing I want to do. Yeah, well you still need to take them.

~~~
kazinator
All university credits are relevant to that job, even those humanities courses
and whatever. Credits directly relevant to the job skills are more like
vocational training; whereas university is supposed to be about education.

Also, one reason some jobs prefer applicants with degrees is because
university completion shows that you have some ambition and willingness to
work hard toward a goal that is several years away, in the face of deadlines
and stress, and possibly financial risk also. They know you've pulled a few
all-nighters to get through.

In other words, you're gone through a pretty tough four year (or more)
project: to produce a degreed version of yourself.

That degree shows that you can _work_ , even if you don't have employment
experience.

~~~
ohfunkyeah
One can say that all university credits are relevant to any job but only in
the most general sense. Certainly you wouldn't advocate 8 years of general
education before getting into degree specific education so the amount is at
the very least arbitrary.

Yeah you are probably right about ambition as a general filter too. But the
point remains that universities take advantage of this. They know full-well
that plenty of students are there to get a job and they can and do milk this.

Issuing degrees is not part of Universities being "about education". Degrees
are an arbitrary milestone, that can be received after completing a nearly
arbitrary set of classes, that in-turn have taught an arbitrary set of
lessons. The fact that Universities have coalesced around issuing degrees of
the same type without ensuring their curriculums match further makes the
degrees aribitrary.

------
bobochan
I have had a chance to look at course evaluation data over time and the scary
thing about it is how quickly ratings can change from year to year. One year a
professor might be considered an absolute rock star with students raving about
the course, but a problematic upgrade to a piece of software used in the
course can drive students absolutely mad the next year. I'm convinced that
there is a group think that occurs very quickly in the term and profs are
immediately labeled as either stars or bozos, and it is hard to change that
perception once it has formed.

Another huge factor in course evaluations is the economic environment and
prospects for upcoming graduates. Tight labor markets seem to correlate with
higher course evaluations as students value subjects that will hopefully make
them more marketable. Conversely, a lot of courses get hammered when the job
market is good because students start getting a "just give me the piece of
paper so I can get out there" feeling.

~~~
Fomite
The thing that strikes me is how small the sample sizes are - most students
really can't be bothered to fill out evaluations, and those who do are
probably not an unbiased sample. There's often maybe a handful of evaluations
per year for anything but massive lecture classes. It's hard to even _make_
meaningful or realistic estimates of the quality of a teacher from that data.

~~~
bobochan
Very true, but there are certainly ways that schools can up the response rates
if they are interested. Some schools authentication systems that store a
student's ID on one system when they complete the evaluation and the actual
response anonymously on another system. You can then set policy to say, "Your
final grades will not be released until you complete the course evaluation." I
have also noticed that giving students 10 minutes at the beginning of the last
class, with the professor leaving the room, helps the rate.

------
tmerr
I have finite attention. Attention (time and effort) is probably more
important to my learning than the quality of my teacher. Without attention you
fail. With infinite attention you get a perfect grade.

When you take a hard course it consumes a disproportionate amount of
attention. Even if the teacher is bad at his/her job a harsh grading scheme
will drive you to spend hours in the library. You will learn a lot because you
are burning valuable attention; attention other classes can not have. So such
a class necessarily good? Of course not. Not if the learning benefit is
outweighed by learning opportunity cost.

So regarding the finding of the study

    
    
        The better the professors were, as measured by their
        students' grades in later classes, the lower their
        ratings from students.
    

I'm not confident that performance in later classes of the same sequence is a
fair measure of learning; what matters to me is performance in ALL later
classes. How do evaluations correlate then?

------
jordanpg
One vote for the point of view that says I don't really much care how well-
rated as teachers research professors are.

My tax dollars should be mostly _supporting their research._ Teaching should
be a _collateral duty_. It is _not a valuable use of time_ for good
researchers. If we need superb instructors to teach basic material to
undergrads, let them be called something else.

Is there really a single person on this forum who didn't do the bulk of their
real learning outside the classroom, anyway?

~~~
chrisbennet
It's not as prestigious, but a college without a graduate program will have
teachers that are there just to teach. You get taught by professors not not
teaching assistants.

~~~
jordanpg
That's fine and even important, but there are huge swathes of the American
population that don't understand the distinction between research professors
and folks like teachers, instructors, and lecturers. They get painted with one
brush and, in this instance, are used to score political points with grossly
ill-informed voters who have somehow decided that they don't like
universities.

------
FruitForce
As a student myself, in my final year of University and I do feel that there
definitely needs to be more control/transparency where the tuition fees go.

The faculty that I am on is one of the lowest scoring areas of the university
according to the National Student Survey. I assume this is due to the
lecturers not having the knowledge or experience when compared to the students
who are passionate about their field which they are currently studying for a
degree in. Most have managed to get the job with little industry experience to
share with students and don't have experience with a modern workflow such as
using Linux, git, etc.

Personally, I would be much more happier if the lecturers have a basic salary
but then allow students to give more of a percentage of their tuition fees to
the departments that keep up to date with their field.

------
heapcity
I'm an abrasive type teacher who gets polarized response distributions. Once
when I substituted for the most highly rated professor at a local cc in my
subject, I received a most memorable compliment: 'Finally, a real teacher.'
... I quit teaching after one too many interventions from administration and
parents about crying kids who could not possibly make less than an A.

------
bunderbunder
I've heard about (but not yet read) studies indicating a similar relationship
between patient satisfaction and outcome for medical professionals to the one
between student satisfaction and outcome. There's a pretty strong negative
correlation between the two.

Frankly, I'm not surprised. Back when I was TAing and tutoring, it was pretty
clear to me that a great many students just wanted the high mark, and were
much less concerned with how they got it. And I've had _way_ too many
conversations with people complaining about a doctor refusing to prescribe
antibiotics for a viral infection.

------
cafard
'Ted Hilles, the chairman, was a remarkably kind man who was embarrassed by
having to do so, but he read the student comments aloud to each of us. "This
is the kind of teacher that I came to Yale to study with,", the student you
had given a B+ or an A would say. Then there would follow the report of
students like Smithers, to whom you cad given a C or a D: "This man is the
worst teacher I have ever studied with, he is a disgrace to the Yale faculty
and far infirior [sic] to my masters at Andover. A profound cynicism about
student comments was born from the experience of hearing these absolutely
opposite evaluations one after another and knowing how closely they correlated
with the grades you had given."

\--Alvin Kernan, _In Plato 's Cave_

I don't recall there being student evaluations of teachers in my undergraduate
days (which were _not_ spent at Yale or anything like it). When I went back to
school part time in my 30s, I wrote bad things about only a couple of
instructors, both for showing up unprepared (and occasionally not showing up
at all).

~~~
balabaster
The problem with this approach is that it's hard to evaluate the performance
of your teacher until many years later, at a time when you only just came to
realize that not only had you learned a lesson, but also the magnitude and how
profound that lesson was. I didn't come to appreciate everything my grade
school teachers instilled in me until many years into my professional career.
If you'd asked me as I was getting ready for my exams how I'd rated them as
teachers, those I liked the most would have gotten the highest grades
regardless of how much I'd really learned from them. Those I liked the least
would have gotten the lowest grades. It wasn't until many years later that
those I liked the least during my academic career (if you can call it that)
were the ones who actually taught me the most. It would have been a shame for
them to be fired on something so subjective as how much I liked them or how
dissatisfied I was that they'd just issued me the 4th 'D' grade in a row.

It's only now that I genuinely appreciate everything they taught me that I
feel honestly worthy of sitting in their classroom again to learn what is
they're willing to impart.

So I say thanks to those teachers that pushed me, those that held me
accountable, those that I disliked during school. It was you that would likely
have been fired by these performance evaluations that gave me the most. I just
never would have had the foresight to give you the grade you deserved.

------
rtconner
As someone who had a few professors/teachers who I hated while in their class,
and now really appreciate looking back : Never trust a student opinion on a
professor.

------
727374
Determining professor tenure via student rating is obviously an extreme idea
and likely to fail as outlined by many of the other comments in this thread.
But, framing students as customers, is a worthwhile debate to have in the US
given the high cost of tuition. Considering the crushing debt student loans
can create, students should think of going to college as an investment with
risk and return. I wish it were not this way. Let's not pretend that most US
universities aren't operating like sophisticated businesses concerned with
marketing, generating revenue, and besting competitors. That makes students
(along with some other groups) customers. And perhaps if these customers are
unhappy, maybe we should blame management (administrators) instead of
professors.

------
rickdale
When I was studying CS in undergrad I took an upper level CS course that was
suppose to end with learning assembly and building something with it. The
class for whatever reason moved excruciatingly slow and we never got past the
second or third project. The following semester my advisor who was also a cs
professor pulled me aside and asked me, "what the heck happened in that
class?" And after my answer he said he would take care of it.

For whatever its worth the professor that was teaching the class was and still
is the head of the department. And the other professor I confided in retired
the following year and moved to Florida. Probably unrelated, but I can see
department politics fixing the issue of poorly taught classes.

------
xijuan
I just wanted to say few things about my experiences on reading students'
ratings on ratemyprofressor.com.

First, professors who consistently get good ratings are usually very good
lecturers. They are not necessarily easy profs. But they do give great
lectures and explain things more thoroughly. On the other hand, professors who
get consistently low ratings are usually not good. For example, last term, I
took a course with a prof who got 2/5 on ratemyprofessor and her lectures
indeed suck although she is a kind person. She doesn't explain the math
materials she is teaching; just barely writes down notes on the board. And all
the students I have talked to also think she is not a good teacher. The term
before I took a course a prof who got 4/5 on ratemyprofessor. She is indeed a
great prof and explained everything so clearly. Our class wrote the same exams
as the sections but our average was 7 percentage higher overall.

Of course, the ratings from that website may not be equivalent to the ratings
profs get from their actual teaching evaluation. But from my experience, I
think the students do have the ability to distinguish between good profs and
bad profs. And students' ratings are not only based on how easy the course is
but also based on how interesting the lectures are and how approachable the
prof is.

Does anyone who has an opposite experience from what I have experienced? That
is taking a course who a prof who got high ratings on ratemyprofs but felt the
prof was bad.

~~~
ColinWright
But everything you say is what everyone believes is "common sense." If all you
want are clear lectures well delivered, great, follow the advice on some
random rating website.

The research, however, says that the student evaluations are negatively
correlated with subsequent ability in the subject. In other words, you are
repeating the common sense view that is flatly contradicted by careful
research.

What should I trust: your anecdata, or published research?

------
emodendroket
Idiotic and the adoption of it would destroy public universities, but I
suspect that's actually the intent (just like the NC stuff about how
professors must teach 4 classes a year).

------
VLM
I see an article and HN post full of obsolete old people thinking. You can't
outsource responsibility for your life to someone else and then complain about
it. The prof is not responsible for what a student learns or enjoys any more
than the prof is responsible for the students sex life or religious belief.
The student is responsible for learning the material. If the prof refuses to
answer questions or refuses to eval the students the prof is guilty. If the
students are lazy thats too bad for the student, sucks to be them. If the
students don't like their prof, who cares, they're just ignorant kids till
they learn something useful...

Old people thinking is you learn for 4 years then work at the same company
doing the same thing for 43 years and retire with the corporate gold watch.
Young people thinking is you learn full time for 4 years and then work while
learning part time for 45+ years. For 4 years you have profs who you think you
can outsource your responsibility for learning to... and your plan for the
following 45+ professor-less years, still have to learn with no one to
outsource your responsibility for learning to? Good luck with that.

There is also the missed effect of warped samples because the population is
not constant over time. Lazy students either sink or swim and possibly learn
to avoid hard profs in the future. Given that selection pressure its hard to
imagine hard profs not resulting in better grades later because the sample is
self selecting itself away from hard profs or dropping out. Even if there is
no difference in educational attainment between hard and soft profs.

------
crazy1van
"And therein lies the paradox. Yes, students are paying, often handsomely, for
their degree. But they're not exactly customers, either. They're participants
in an experience — one that is meant to be challenging, even grueling."

If that's "not exactly" the definition of a customer, I'm not sure what is.
The students are customers. The real paradox is if they vote for easier
teachers, the product they are buying loses its value.

~~~
ColinWright
Perhaps the problem is that the customer thinks they're buying one thing, the
professors think they're selling something different. There's no clear
statement as to what the product actually is.

Is the product an education, or a degree?

------
bfuller
Terrible idea. I went to a school where students had no problems calling mommy
and daddy and the parents had quite the culture of bringing lawyers against
the university.

The university had a rule of never taking these things to court, so they would
always settle. Even when it was stupid things like students violating an
attendance policy, failing their class because of it, and then getting off
scott free beacuse their parents called a lawyer.

Disgusting practice.

------
sbpayne
Yeah, this is certainly ridiculous. Student ratings often correlate more with
grades than they do actual effectiveness of professors.

The professors who inflate grades (and thus are really the ones that are
diminishing educational value) are the ones who would keep their jobs.

I like the place this is coming from (there's zero accountability from
students to professors). But such an extreme measure is something I feel would
work against the end goal.

------
x3n0ph3n3
The last thing we want is a coalition of creationist students getting their
biology professor fired because he dared to teach them about evolution.

------
mreiland
I hate history. HATE HISTORY.

In Uni I had to take my final history course and only 1 professor was
available. Little did I know at the time...

The man was a hardass. a quiz every single class over the previous classes
lecture, you can only make up 3 quizzes, after that it's too bad so sad.

And yet I LOVED the course. People talk about good orators and I had never
known one until I met this guy. I was absolutely enthralled every lecture. He
was just amazing to listen to, somehow he made what he was talking about seem
exciting, it was crazy.

I passed the class with an A and I've never regretted taking that class. I
remember it fondly. And I'm the guy that would completely stop going to
classes, showing up only for the tests, so that's saying something.

I think it's a terrible idea to start grading professors on by their students
evaluation. I think student evaluations are good, but personally I think too
many professors already cater to their students, the problem would only get
worse. And the ones who are there to learn will get left behind.

------
imron
> "Professors need to understand that their customers are those students,"

Perhaps professors should work for tips too /s

------
ponderatul
Let me give you the other perspective, the one where we ask if the professor
is payed by the University to teach. From my understanding they are chosen for
their research, their interest lies in research and so the incentives are
aligned towards that.

That way teaching for a large amount of academic professors is just a side-
job, and comes secondary in the pecking order to researching itself. I'm
specifically targeting Management/Business courses in the UK.

Now you see why student evaluations are used. We can suffer the consequences
of this disconnect between incentives and foci of an academic, and that
becomes problematic.

Most academics need to be kept in check, and connected to the realities of how
the students experience their course, in terms of "support available";
"clarity" etc.

------
pistle
What if a small, semi-random sample of voters could fire an elected official
for any piece of legislation they attach their name to?

I see the grades in Iowa elevating and the market-value of a degree from Iowa
discounting. You get an A! You get an A! You get an A! You ALL GET AN "A"!!!!

------
retali8
It's really frustrating when I paid $50k/yr at a top 5 univ for CS deg, and
some of the CS courses (including a junior year core) were taught by PhD
students with incomprehensible English accents. I have no issue with non-
english speakers getting their PhDs...they're obviously very intelligent and I
respect them greatly...however, they are not suited at all for instruction by
lecture... in those courses i learned nothing during class, and learned
everything myself later on.

i once had a PhD student as lecturer in an advanced track course -- we bumped
into him at a bar one saturday...this guy was jumping all over the tables,
drunk and wasted out of his damn mind...

now i did have some amazing profs but those were all tenured.

------
douche
In my experience, the teachers I learned the most from were also the best
teachers, i.e. the most engaging. Difficulty was really a separate concern, in
a lot of ways. There were very easy courses that I learned a huge amount from,
and difficult courses that weren't worth the time I spent on them.

To be honest, I only bothered to rate professors because I couldn't see my
final grades until I did so. Consequently, only the very excellent and the
very terrible really got any kind of response.

------
jackmaney
I am _SO_ fucking glad that I'm not in academia anymore.

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
Sorry. Outside of community colleges, professors are researchers first and
teachers second.

Let the students fire the TAs. Not like they get paid anyway.

------
jestinjoy1
Students rating professors is bad because

1\. Professors raise bar sometimes which students find difficult to cope with
and result in low feedback

2\. Some students try to "hit" professors with low grades since they are not
interested in them

3\. More work by professors means low grades from students

This is what usually happens in India and I am a professor

~~~
ohfunkyeah
I disagree completely. You are confusing students rating professors with the
how good the survey is and how the university may or may not react to the
results. In an of itself rating professors is not good or bad.

1\. Part of raising the bar should be making sure students understand that you
are doing it and are into it. Also by saying "raising the bar" you are
implying that they are going above what the rest of the university is doing.
Which is an indictment of the university not of the students. 2\. Why aren't
they interested in them? Could it be because they are not good? 3\. So
professors should be able to assign any amount of work that they deem fit? If
its a 2-credit course with the workload of a 4-credit course then the
professor is bad. If its a 4-credit class and other 4-credit classes have
significantly less work, then the university is screwing up. If the its a
4-credit course with a lot more work than other 4-credit courses then that
should probably be clearly conveyed up front or have some mechanism for
conveying that.

------
spython
I am studying media art at the University for Arts and Design Karlsruhe,
Germany [1]. It was founded in the nineties, alongside ZKM, the Museum for new
media [2]. One of the founding principles of the school was to limit professor
tenure to three years, regardless of the performance. The idea behind it was
to prevent the school to become a morass of old ideas and stay competitive in
a new field.

It succeeded to a degree, especially with regard to the sheer number of
different artistic positions that get to be represented at a small university.
It is not without fault however - the quality of teaching is not constant;
after a professor leaves there is oftentimes a semester of emptiness until a
new one arrives.

And while the students can not fire a professor, they have a vote in the
committee that decides which person to hire as the next professor.

[1] [http://www.hfg-karlsruhe.de/](http://www.hfg-karlsruhe.de/) [2]
[http://zkm.de/](http://zkm.de/)

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rayiner
What if kids could fire their parents?

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Dotnaught
Everyone would get an "A"?

~~~
Siecje
You can still not learn very much and still get a good grade.

Students are attending to learn and will give negative reviews when they are
not learning as much as they expected they would learn.

~~~
dagw
_Students are attending to learn_

Depends very much on the course. A lot courses are attended by a lot of
students who just need the course to fulfill some requirement and want nothing
more than to get a pass with as little work as possible.

~~~
emodendroket
It's hardly the case that the same thing doesn't apply to students majoring in
the subject.

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vishaldpatel
Having been through three colleges, the professors that seemed to be disliked
were not the ones that were the most difficult, but the ones that were
terrible at explaining the material to the students.

For some classes, students stopped going to class and studied on their own.

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vonnik
I attended Deep Springs College, where students literally hire and fire the
faculty. It works all right on a very small scale, when the students are
committed to learning. Not so well when the students don't like the work that
learning requires.

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komodekork
A universitys main focus should be on research, education is second. Let the
colleges educate the masses. Therefore students shouldn't have a say in if a
professor should be on the faculty or not, as long as he is churning out good
papers.

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nautical
Let me rephrase it a little bit .. What if in Kung-Fu Panda , the panda could
fire his master . FIRE is very strong word , it talks about power over another
, teaching is more of trusting some one and accepting someone higher .

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jccalhoun
comments on student evals can be crazy. I once had a student write "Stop
dressing like a hobo."

Who even uses the word "hobo?"

To be fair I was going through a faze where I was carrying my things around in
a bandana tied on a stick... ;-)

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j2kun
The market would fix this should the bill become a law. All professors and
applicants who care about their jobs will just leave Iowa or never go there in
the first place. I wonder who will suffer then?

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
Wages will increase and the highest quality professors will flock to Iowa to
become millionaires. Kinda like how it is in Korea.

~~~
j2kun
Have you seen professor wages recently? It would be much cheaper to lobby to
counter the law than it would be to give wages that would draw professors to a
shitty job. If they wanted wages, they'd leave academia anyway.

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sgustard
After I'm finished firing my professors, do I still get my degree?

~~~
VLM
The purpose of higher ed is to outsource the selective pressure from corporate
HR depts to university admissions depts. So the corporation can hire the
"right people from the right social groups" by using the degree as proxy.

Seeing as the admissions dept has already done all the work of filtering
applicants to select the right ones, sure, why not.

May as well issue the degree at admission time, skip the dog and pony show of
4 years of attendance. It'll have little to no effect on outcomes in non-
vocational fields.

The vocational fields don't belong at uni/college anyway, they belong at vo-
tech schools just like welding or diesel repair.

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vacri
How does this not violate the Eighth Amendment: _Excessive bail shall not be
required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments
inflicted_. Automatic loss of job with no recourse can be seen as both an
excessive fine and a cruel punishment.

In other news, a friend's wife here in Australia was an XO at a Navy training
base. He told me that the base brought in a 'soccer card' system where the
recruits could card the drill sergeants and make them face disciplinary
action. This didn't take long to completely undermine the ability to make the
recruits learn anything and waste the CO's time with meaningless disciplinary
hearings, and was turfed out in short order.

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gamechangr
What about giving feedback after graduation?

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wiggumz
I can see it now, it will be like Lord of the Flies... Or perhaps profs will
feel obliged to give out A's to keep their jobs.

