Good morning, and welcome to Monday, October 30. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: rick.seltzer@chronicle.com.
Economics professors face a perverse incentive
Let’s zoom in on one department at a public university in Virginia to explore broader debates about how faculty performance can be evaluated amid grade-inflation worries and intense competition for students. Our Charlotte Matherly has the story.
Six economics professors at James Madison University said their annual evaluation scores dropped this year. Five were driven by lower teaching scores, they allege.
- Lower scores can change professors’ careers. In this case, they fell from “excellent” to “satisfactory.” That means the professors are still meeting minimum requirements to keep their jobs but risk missing promotions and merit pay.
The professors were told to provide students with extra assistance in order to reduce the number of D and F grades, by the department’s new academic-unit head, Charlene M. Kalenkoski, in several of her evaluation letters. “Meet students where they are,” she added.
Faculty members think the evaluations included no attempt to measure what happened in the classroom, even as they carried a not-so-subtle message to water down standards. Some professors said they were told in one-on-one evaluation meetings about a collegewide goal to improve grades.
- Quotable: “The point was, my GPAs were too low, period. And it didn’t matter whether there was integrity to those grades or not,” said Scott R. Milliman, an economics professor.
As any economics student will recognize, evaluating faculty members purely on the grades they hand out introduces a perverse incentive: give good grades to students who don’t deserve them to save your own skin, disregarding the quality of education in the classroom.
Administrators maintain that James Madison isn’t pushing faculty members to inflate grades. Its business dean said higher grades are the effect of improved learning.
To be sure, larger power and interpersonal dynamics are at play. At James Madison, academic-unit heads — who are hired by deans rather than chairs — govern departments. Some professors dislike that organizational chart because they say it takes away the accountability that a chair normally has to the faculty.
Economics professors have been butting heads with the new academic-unit head over the past year. Amid the latest spat, one has resigned, another is retiring early, and others say they’re seeking new jobs.
The backdrop to this departmental discord is that James Madison is working to grow in size and prestige in the face of a competitive market for students.
- Enrollment is up, increasing by 4.7 percent to 22,224 from the fall of 2015 to the fall of last year.
- Research has become more prominent, with James Madison reclassified last year as an R2 doctoral university, signaling high research activity.
The situation at James Madison is just one part of a much bigger disagreement over how to evaluate faculty performance amid concerns about higher education’s instructional effectiveness and student learning loss resulting from the pandemic. Policymakers are also increasingly skeptical about tenure, raising the stakes for accurate performance evaluations.
All evaluation metrics have drawbacks. Critics point to biased student evaluations that routinely harm scores for women and people of color. Similar problems crop up in peer evaluations. Grades can be more useful to evaluate whether course materials and prerequisites are effectively preparing students, than they are for checking the overall performance of an individual faculty member. Professors often favor reviews of course materials and assignments they gave students, but those can be too time-intensive to be done regularly at scale.
The big questions: Do colleges grade students in order to gauge the merits of their work, measure instructors’ ability, or curry favor from consumers?
Read the full story here.
