"Duke has maintained its commitment to excellence in undergraduate education even as its faculty has grown in national and international prominence for scholarship and research. Duke's graduate faculty in Arts and Sciences and Engineering are active undergraduate teachers."
-Nannerl Keohane, Ph.D., from Shaping our Future: A Young University Faces a New Century (Sept., 1994).
How does she know?
Even though President Keohane made that statement way back in 1994, it still summarizes the admissions office's message to prospective students and parents that we have great teachers that will challenge and stimulate you in a way that may justify you spending an obscene amount of money on this university. I laugh every time I read that sort of propaganda. Why? Because to make that statement true, the University would need some sort of quantitative way to measure teaching performance and use that measure to make decisions when giving promotions and tenure. Does the University have such a mechanism?
Don't be silly. Of course it doesn't.
Teaching performance is a key concern when prospective students assess universities. This is because that is the basis of an education. Researching ability cannot help a student understand an abstract theory. Just because a professor's work is widely read and respected, it does not mean he can stimulate the mind of an undergraduate. Consequently, maintaining a high level of teaching performance is necessary for the success of any undergraduate program. The need for such feedback machinery is clear.
Currently, there is no mechanism in place that can adequately measure teaching performance, much less use that information in making decisions that will affect the career of a faculty member.
The status quo consists of students filling out end-of-term green sheets whose final destination is never really made clear. What is clear is that whatever is written on the sheets probably only provides the professor with a few good laughs.
The first step toward building a workable alternative is to create a system that measures teaching performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. The Arts and Sciences Council recently approved a new form of course evaluation that will do just that. The new form combines the qualitative and quantitative data and changes some of the familiar questions. Although I would need to see a copy of the proposed form to make an accurate assessment of it, its description sounds like a step in the right direction. There are some questions on the current evaluation forms that do not make much sense for some classes. Why ask about classroom dynamics in a lecture course? There is no classroom dynamic in a lecture; it is static by nature. I am glad to see that the Arts and Sciences Council has started to take this first step toward a healthier teaching evaluation system. However, more is needed in order to make this system viable.
The accessibility of the evaluation data is essential. All students should have access to the complete data. Students should be able to use teaching ability as a criterion when selecting classes. Course content, although important, does not provide a student with an adequate idea of what the class will be like. Some may feel that certain evaluations will be too harsh and will portray a professor unfairly. Students understand that no one comment could possibly summarize a professor's ability. A long string of negative comments is a different story entirely.
The third component of the new course evaluation system should be some feedback mechanism between teaching performance and promotions. Currently, the University uses research quality as the key factor in granting promotions and tenure, placing little value on teaching performance. This system tells undergraduates that the University simply does not care about teaching performance. By holding professors accountable for their teaching, the University makes a strong statement that says, "We care about our undergraduates." This statement is more powerful than any propaganda the admissions office may distribute. Professors may fear such negative comments, but this is good. Such fear will force them to look at new ways of teaching and to pay more attention to a job that is often overlooked at the University. A similar system should be used for graduate students, who as a group teach many undergraduate classes.
Enhancing the quality of undergraduate teaching should be a high priority for the University. The only way to this outcome is to accurately measure teaching performance and use the data when considering faculty promotions. It is encouraging to see the administration take some steps toward this goal, despite the fact that such a system should have been implemented 20 years ago. If it had been, maybe President Keohane could talk about the University's teaching quality with tangible facts to support her and not just the disinformation provided by the Duke Public Relations Machine.
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