Market Power

Why Are Academic Departments Seemingly Dysfunctional?

Via the Door comes this on intra-departmental infighting from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. 

I'll add one thing... perhaps part of the conflict within departments arises from the fact that in departments with lots of senior faculty, those faculty have been around one another for many, many years, and they may, simply, be tired of one-another.

Student Evaluations

I've never been much of a fan of student evaluations.  They do provide some information, and I suppose they do give students hope that Monstrous State University administrators actually value them outside of their tuition and fee payments and their future roles as donors.  But the information they contain is very noisy, and requires a big grain of salt.  To wit, from Carrell and West at NBER

It is difficult to measure teaching quality at the postsecondary level because students typically "self-select" their coursework and their professors. Despite this, student evaluations of professors are widely used in faculty promotion and tenure decisions. We exploit the random assignment of college students to professors in a large body of required coursework to examine how professor quality affects student achievement. Introductory course professors significantly affect student achievement in contemporaneous and follow-on related courses, but the effects are quite heterogeneous across subjects. Students of professors who as a group perform well in the initial mathematics course perform significantly worse in follow-on related math, science, and engineering courses. We find that the academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of mathematics and science professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous student achievement, but positively related to follow-on course achievement. Across all subjects, student evaluations of professors are positive predictors of contemporaneous course achievement, but are poor predictors of follow-on course achievement.

Here's an ungated version of the Carrell and West study.  Angus at KPC has more here, including the interesting tidbit that evaluations depend on the physical attractiveness of the instructor.  I best lay off the Butterfingers.  Then again, I'm tenured.

The Benefits of Being a Full Professor

Daniel Drezner via MR:

10)  You get to pig out.  More attractive professors tend to do better in student evaluations and other metrics to rate professors. This is not surprising -- after all, the attractive receive a similar dividend across professions.

There's no rank beyond full professor, however. So, that's it for me. My fight against my expanding waistline was rapidly turning into a quagmire anyway. From now on, it's not going to be an either/or choice with me -- I'm going to both Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks whenever I see one on the road!!

Dude, that's how you become a full professor!

And the number one reason:

1)  When the moon is full, I get to kill a student.

That's harsh.  Were my father still alive, he'd replace "student" with "administrator" ;-)

Fired Professor Settles and The Use of Anti-Plagiarism Software

The supporters of a professor fired for plagiarism pressured the administration at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, by using anti-plagiarism software to provide evidence that administrators at SIUE had themselves plagiarized.

Dussold's case drew more attention once his supporters formed a group called Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at SIU. This group used anti-plagiarism software to catch other faculty members and senior officials who appeared to have plagiarized.

Individuals involved with this group leaked those accusations to media outlets. Plagiarism allegations were made against SIUE Chancellor Vaughn Vandegrift, former SIU-Carbondale Chancellor Walter Wendler and SIU President Glenn Poshard.

Here's more on the case from SIUE side (2 years ago).  Here's a bit more on the original suit.

What caught me about the article, besides the interesting case of the professor, was the use of the software.  How will college administrators at other places respond to this lawsuit?  Will they begin to be more careful about the use of this software at their schools lest they get caught in the same trap?

 

Got Skillz?

OMG!  A master's degree in social responsibility?

I'm Still Around and What I've Been Doing

It's been a pretty busy week semester.  I've been working on a dataset for a paper I'm writing this semester and that's taken a lot of creative time.  That and I've been putting my sports economics notes into PowerPoint.  I figure that if PowerPoint presentations in the classroom are going to be effective, they need to mimic the dynamism of the chalkboard.  On a chalkboard, words are written one by one.  Graphs are drawn bit by bit.  When I draw graphs that describe some comparative statics, it's important to use different colors so that students can follow what I'm trying to get across. 

In PowerPoint, that means animating the text and the graphics.  But animating entire graphs can be a very time-consuming process.  I have to think about how I would draw the graph on a blackboard, line by line and notation by notation.  So it takes awhile to get it right.  The opportunity cost has been writing on the blog. 

I still have quite a ways to go before the dataset will be ready - hopefully I'll have it done before finals.  But my sports econ notes are almost completely finished. My students have tests coming up soon and I will have to work on my sports econ test bank I've been working on as well this semester.  Lastly, my advisees have registration coming up soon, which means more foot traffic at my office.  Hopefully I will be able to post more substantive stuff rather than the "looky looky what I found" posts I've had recently.

More on Note Taking

Recently I've written here and here about note-taking in class.  Don Coffin sent me this document on the Cornell note-taking system, a 5-step process to improve student note-taking abilities.  Note that good note-taking is something not confined to the classroom.  It also requires effort outside of class.

I did steps 1 (take notes in class) and 5 (review frequently) consistently.  I, sort of, did step 2 (go over notes ASAP after class).  When I reviewed after class, I would do so with pen in hand to add notes that were still fresh in my mind that I didn't have time to write (or forgot to write) during class.  I never did point 3 (summarize notes in my own words at some later time and then compare the summary to my actual notes). I had my own particular strategy for point 4 (reflect on my notes):  when I studied for tests, I always studied the latest material first.  The latest material built upon earlier material, so by studying the later material first, I was implicitly studying the earlier material. 

I also had a knack for figuring out what would be most likely to be covered on exams, allowing me to focus my energies more efficiently.

I also stayed away from study groups.  I knew darned well that if I got together with a group I'd want to socialize, not work.  So I learned to study by myself.

This is what worked for me.

Open Letter To Students

Don't be this stupid, OK?

Study: 17.6% of Social Scientists in the Academy are Marxist

Here is the paper.  Here is the Inside Higher Ed story.  Here is a post from The Volokh Conspiracy.  HT to Coyote. 

I haven't read the paper, so I can't comment on methodology or the data.  I did look through it to see whether economists were considered social scientists (I couldn't tell).  Assuming so and taking them out, the remaining Marxist proportion will be much higher than 17.6%.  The authors note that over 25% of sociologists in their survey say they are Marxist.

Note Taking and Note Giving

From the Door:

Somewhere a few years back--2000? 2002?--the vast majority of my undergraduate students stopped taking notes in class. I'm not sure why. At first, I thought it would be inappropriate for me to tell them to do it. (I thought it would be similar to telling them, "Read the book. Brush your teeth. Change your underwear every once in a while.")

Not any longer.

Current and future students of mine: please read, and take seriously, Mike Moffatt's "How to Take Lecture Notes in Your Economics Class". For extra credit, please read "Taking Notes That Work".

I learned how to take good notes by my second semester in college.  One strategy I employed was to closely re-read my notes with pen in hand ASAP after lecture.  Doing that allowed me to add things to my notes that I didn't write down for one reason or another, giving me a more complete set of notes.  I didn't have to force myself to remember things from lecture.  Rereading the notes helped me recall a lot of things.

When studying, many times I would rewrite my notes.  Writing forces you to think thoroughly about what you are trying to put down on paper, and I found that I studied better and, thus, performed better on tests. 

Since becoming a prof, few of my students who come to class do not take notes.  One reason is that I write most of the important things on the board which students dutifully copy.  But since I teach 3-4 classes on my teaching days, this makes for a very tired arm by the end of the day.  Students have remarked positively about this strategy, so I continue to do it. 

Another thing I do to help students remember key topics, especially equations, is to write them on the board over and over and over.  As I mentioned earlier, writing forces people to think.  Writing something over and over helps people remember things.  That's why elementary school teachers had the naughty kids stay after school and write "I will not throw frogs at little Jenny on the playground" over and over.