Posts tagged with courses.

Ratemyprofessors.com paints depressing picture

Bryce Warnes, January 15, 2010 at 2:32 PM

 

It's tempting to believe that you can summarize something as complex and nuanced as a person's teaching style on a five-point scale. That's the model RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) uses, compiling opinions based on an instructor's scores for clarity, helpfulness, ease of marking, and physical attractiveness. After a hit-and-miss first semester, I thought some online planning might make the second half of my year at UBC smoother.

 

I originally endorsed the idea out of principle. As a member - for better or for worse - of Generation Y, I'm ready to embrace any information aggregation service that saves me from forming my own opinions. But while sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are great for deciding which movies or music to buy, the same doesn't follow for choosing university courses based on professors' online ratings.

 

There are a couple of problems with RMP, not least of which are the categories they use for rating. "Clarity" and "helpfulness" make sense on first glance, but the terms are vague. Does clarity describe how clearly someone speaks, or how much what they're saying makes sense? What about a teacher with perfect elocution who still leaves their students in the dust because of how they communicate the course material? And can a teacher be helpful even if they aren't clear?

 

The "hotness" category might seem shallow and only mildly entertaining, but according to this study, there's a correlation between how teachers rate for personal attractiveness and their "quality" ratings - how they measure up as educators. So hotness has some real value, at least. It tells us that the people entering ratings on the site don't draw clear distinctions between academic and MTV mentalities.

 

Unfortunately, even a professor's "quality," according to RMP, is flawed by the way it's measured. The overall quality rating for a teacher is drawn at least partially from their "easiness" rating - that is, how easy they are as markers. According to RMP, the better a professor is, the easier it is to get good marks from them without exerting much effort. Does it say something bad about the way I look at the world that, at first, this category made perfect sense to me?

 

Surely I'm not the only one. The category exists for a reason, after all. And it illustrates one of the main flaws of the site, as far as making academic choices is concerned. Because of the ratings RMP uses, it forces anyone entering a rating to do so from the perspective of a consumer.

 

That's what consumers look for, right? Ease. A lack of necessary action. The ability to get what you want quickly and without fuss. The focus at school, then, isn't on the complexity of what you learn, how your mind grows or your perspective changes. The focus is on the grades you receive, the average you maintain, and your eligibility for future programs or scholarships. Or anyway, that's the way it looks from a very base perspective, one which RMP reflects.

 

There's more to it than that, though. What about the professors who aren't great at providing a positive consumer experience, but are really great teachers? The ones who never answer their e-mails, but give amazing lectures? Or the irascible, emotionally distant ones who nevertheless inject the subject they teach with genuine passion? These hard-to-pin-down impressions don't transfer so well to a user rating site, and maybe there's a reason for that.

 

After all, teaching is a messy business. Computers can exactly replicate huge amounts of data. You can move decades of research material from one hard drive to another with nary a byte out of place. But a teacher's job is to transfer ideas from their own brains into the brains of others using spoken words, some sheaves of dead tree, and maybe the occasional PowerPoint. It doesn't match up to the kind of fast, flawless customer service we expect in the 21st century.

 

Even the original creators of the site don't seem to take its content too seriously, suggesting that all RMP does is aggregate the sort of "chatter" one might share with their peers outside of the class and making it accessible on a broader level. It's definitely not meant as a tool degrees should be built around. But all the same, it presents a depressing picture of how students regard school - as a service to be exploited for maximum value, and not as a process of learning or development. Will it be long before degrees are available at Wal-Mart?

 

                                                                                 

Tagged with students, courses, profs, ratemyprofessors.com, rate, teaching, bryce, warnes | Comments (22) |

Minimum wage and the sad absurdity of the human race

Bryce Warnes, September 4, 2009 at 11:36 AM

Since November I've been working at a gas station for nine dollars an hour. The experience has been educational in the same way that peeing  on an electric fence is educational: it teaches you never to do it again. To be honest, though, I've had worse jobs. I worked for a while waiting tables in a restaurant. The owners were elderly and knew just enough English to tell me how slow I was. The rest of the time, I'm pretty sure they were making fun of me in Vietnamese. Selling Slurpees and cigarettes for a living may be a grind, but at least my boss hassles me in a language I can understand.

 

I'm in it for the money, of course. I start at the University of British Columbia in September, and I'm determined not to take on student loans that will haunt me into my twilight years. As with any unpleasant experience, though, there have been lessons to learn. I've gotten to know an elderly Greek Keno addict who visits the store on a daily basis. He's given me tips on picking up the ladies. ("You are lucky to be young and handsome boy. When you are old like me, no woman wants you.") Many of my colleagues have interesting pasts, and at different times they've given me tips on hotwiring cars, picking locks, and dodging drug trafficking charges. If the academic life doesn't work out for me, I'm sure I'll be able to make a living as a petty criminal.

 

I'm shooting for a major in Religion, Literature, and the Arts. Any time I tell someone this, they ask me why. Sometimes I lie and say I want to join the priesthood. (This would never work in reality. I prefer beer over sacramental wine, and I have it on good authority that confessionals are strictly non-smoking areas.) What it really boils down to, I think, is stories.       

 

I understood stories long before I understood human beings. To tell the truth, I still don't understand our species - but I think there are some enlightening truths in the tales we tell. How can you understand the sad absurdity of the human race until you hear the story of the Biblical Fall? How can you appreciate our highs and lows until you learn the tale of the Crucifixion? I've been an agnostic since before I knew what the word meant, but myths and fables have always fascinated me, no matter what tradition they're from. My focus recently has been on the fundamental narrative building blocks of Western belief - hence my academic focus and the examples above. They're the easiest stories for me to understand, because they form the basis of the culture with which I am most familiar - and about which I am often most ambivalent.

 

So next year I'll be taking courses on Mesopotamian and Old Testament myths; on the history of the Christian church; on the cultures of North, West, and Eastern Europe. I'll be learning scriptural Hebrew, for the sake of my language requirement, and Critical Studies in Sexuality, for the sake of adding a little spice to the mix. And because I'm determined to tell stories as well as learn them, I'm taking Creative Writing in New Media. Paper will always have a special sensual enchantment, but the internet offers a potential for communication unprecedented in human history. As absurd as it may sound, the zeitgeists of my generation are destined to be spelled out in blogs and podcasts.

 

Oh, and I'll be moving out, as well. I've overstayed the welcome of a first-born son in his parents' house. In September I'll be leaving Vancouver Island - bucolic haven of hippies and woodsmen, an Eden of old-growth forest and carefully cultivated cannabis - and moving into residence on the UBC campus. My knowledge of campus life mostly comes from bad movies. Do students really have toga parties? Do they play wacky pranks on the aged and dignified Dean? I won't know for another six weeks. Until then, I'll be working the daily grind, packing my belongings, and saying goodbye to the home I love. All of it in preparation for the beginning of a new story.

 

Tagged with literature, summer, wage, minimum, arts, religion, university, courses, moving, bryce, warnes | Comments (6) |