Hello and welcome to Teaching, a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Today, Beckie tells us about one university’s online forum to help students learn the ins and outs of specific courses. Then she tells us about some worthwhile reading, and we ask how you use your pre-semester time to set up your courses for success.
One Way to Supplant RateMyProfessors
Compared with other challenges professors face in the digital age, RateMyProfessors.com seems rather quaint, as I wrote in this recent article about how the site helped internet culture barge into the classroom.
Still, many professors have strong — and usually negative — feelings about the site. What often gets lost, though, is that RateMyProfessors aims to satisfy a need for information and guidance that colleges seem reluctant to fill. As several experts told me, colleges could reduce students’ use of the site if they shared more information about the expectations, workloads, and assumptions of different courses.
That could mean making former students’ course evaluations available to current students. Some colleges already do that, but professors told me that even then the information can be hard to find. That’s too bad, because access to official evaluations would make students less inclined to seek out the unverified ones on RateMyProfessors, said Beth Davison, a professor of sociology at Appalachian State University, who has studied the site.
While comments about professors’ appearance and grading get a lot of the buzz, most of the material that students post on RateMyProfessors is simply descriptive, said Elizabeth Barre, executive director of the Teaching and Learning Collaborative at Wake Forest University. Colleges could provide some of the basic information students are clearly seeking, she said, just by posting syllabi online and doing a better job of advertising courses.
Princeton University has taken this idea one step further. It runs a forum called Principedia, on which students write detailed analyses of courses. The forum, which I heard about from Dominic J. Voge, senior associate director of the university’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, focuses on helping students learn how to learn at the course level. Entries include sections on instruction and assignments, and one with information that students may want to consider as they register. The entries, Voge said, are essentially a “written-down version of a learning consultation.”
Here, for instance, is a bit of the intel provided to those considering one instructor’s “Introduction to Microeconomics” course: “Most students in ECO 100 will earn B-range grades, but this should not discourage them from continuing to take economics courses out of interest. Students might also find that they prefer a certain subject within microeconomics, but it will receive only a lecture or two within ECO 100. Once this prerequisite is finished, students can take more advanced courses that usually give out more A’s, have fewer students, and focus more on specific topics.”
The site has entries for about 200 courses, which span most of the university’s departments. Any Princeton community member — that means current students, as well as faculty and staff members, can post, Voge said, and their comments are not anonymous. Many post from sheer altruism, he said, but the teaching center also has a few strategies to get more students to contribute, like encouraging its tutors and peer academic coaches, whose training can help them do a particularly good job of analyzing a course, to do so. Voge is especially keen to have students unpack large lecture courses, where the strategies it takes to succeed can be especially opaque.
No matter how well-prepared they were, starting out at Princeton is an adjustment for students, Voge said. Among other things, homework plays a different role in college than it did in high school. Problem sets at the university level are neither sufficient test preparation nor a significant grade booster. And students learn by trial and error that the straightforward-sounding instruction to “read” a text means something much more involved than just getting through it. Still, the extent to which Princeton is an adjustment varies significantly by students’ high school and family background.
One of Principedia’s aims, Voge said, is to help level the playing field. The best way to do that, Voge said, is to give all students access to the invisible rules that organize their courses. Otherwise, he said, the grades professors give aren’t a good reflection of students’ mastery of the material — they also include the noise of how well students figured out the professor’s aims. That, he said, is not what professors want grades to mean.
Admitting students from a wider set of schools to Princeton is only part of the access puzzle, Voge said. To succeed there, students also need “access to the curriculum.”
Princeton has made a plug-in available for other colleges that want to create a similar site, Voge said. Interested? You can check that out here.
What does your college or department do to help students make informed decisions about which courses to take? Tell me about it at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and I may include your example in a future newsletter.
