Your entire post seems to be based on the false premise that professors see the evaluations before they submit their grades. As a TA, my experience has been that this is not the case. After the evaluations are completed, a student collects them and hands them into the department/University, and they are not released until early next semester.
In summary, the premise of your argument is completely false.
Another point I should make -- profs rarely let their preconceptions about a student influence their grading. When I'm doing the grading, my primary goal is to get the work done as quickly as possible without being unfair. I have a given quiz graded before I see the name on it -- reading the name is a waste of time. The point is that you can't spend too much time daydreaming about all your students when you have 150 test papers on your desk. 5 minutes per test is already 12.5 hours worth of work. IOW, it's not because the profs are all really ethical and scrupulous -- it's that they don't have the time or inclination to meditate on every single student when there's a pile of ungraded papers on their desk.
But professor reviews aren't posted for the (potential) next class to see BEFORE they enroll.
There's a good reason for a nondisclosure period. The point is that the prof shouldn't be able to see the results until the grades are in. Note that unless it's the prof's first year on the job, the professor will have built up a track record one way or the other.
Besides, who's going to disparage a bad professor on the official U reviews?
As someone who's been reviewed, I can inform you that the students don't seem unwilling to speak their minds ( either way ) on those reviews.
They'de collected before grades are entered
Sure, because they need to be filled out when the class is still in session ( ie before its broken up and hence before grades are out ).
However, the prof isn't allowed to see the reviews until the grades are in ( this is true at every school I've been at. I bet it's true with yours -- check !!! )
Unless he's tenured, that is.
WRONG. Tenured or not, the profs are still subject to the same evaluation process, and the fact that a prof is tenured does not imply that their evaluations are undisclosed.
Because funding is going down and costs are going up.
Half of them are there because they couldn't make it in the real world
The university is very much "real-world". I don't know which crappy school you go to, but at the good schools, professors publish cutting-edge research in cutting-edge journals. They're hardly a bunch of deadbeats.
Unless the department monitor the survey and reward teachers who are considered good, the teacher's incentive to improve is somewhat limited.
Internet polls tend only to attract "extremists", not "moderates". So the majority remains silent.
Internet polls also suffer from ballot-stuffing problems.
Comments posted to internet polls are often not very constructive.
If the poll is totally open ended, that's also a problem, because good polling requires well-chosen questions.
When you fill out those course reviews on your prof before you get your grade you are never sure if that prof will recognize your handwriting and grade you down.
I teach. The reviews aren't available to instructors until after the course is over. IMO, traditional evaluations are much better ( for the students, the prof and the university ) than this online junk.
BTW, you got the other part right -- we're not stupid, and if you have distinctive handwriting, there's a good chance we can tell who you are. We get so many students that we don't take the opinions of individual students terribly personally though.
What's the big deal about posting teacher reviews online?
Nothing. In fact this is already done -- some schools offer teaching evaluations online. The big deal is that the content is allegedly false and defamatory. On the other hand , underground reviews and summaries of student evaluations are not typically peppered with illiteracy, defamatory remarks, and foul language.
It appears to me that the professor does have a case, though he has the rather difficult task of demonstrating that he was hurt by the material , to get a damages award. Getting a court order to have the comments removed is probably easier, though ironically, he's drawing more attention to those comments in the process !
And since the bad teachers don't care about the opinions of their students anyway, why bother giving those grades ?
You can have the department / faculty tie perks/promotions to the grades received from students. This will make them start to "care" about the opinions of the students pretty quickly. I don't believe the website is very helpful because web polls are notoriously biased and suffer from all sorts of ballot stuffing and representative-sample issues -- and this one is certainly no exception. On the other hand, student evaluations can often work quite well.
why reduce yourself to the level of the homophobic clowns who posted that trash ? It's unprofessional. I don't think much of the review website either. I don't think the prof is helping himself much by suing though -- if my teaching was that bad, I would shut up about my teaching.
Your post makes a lot of sense. I've been teaching for some time, and I'm amazed as to how the students who are flunking don't even realise how much they don't understand the work ( ie they think they know it all ), while most of the good students are relatively humble. You're dead right, and there is psychological literature that also demonstrates your point -- people with no talent are confident inspite of their ignorance.
... and internet grading is not the right way. Student evaluations are more effective, especially if there's some kind of disclosure policy on the said evaluations, and faculty performance reviews. Lynching the profs on websites might give you a good feeling, but it doesn't help the prof improve their teaching and it doesn't help the students who'll have to deal with that teacher later on.
After all, a bad grade represents a professor's bad opinion of the student
No it doesn't. It represents the professors appraisal of the student's work. Such an appraisal should be objective and should NOT by any means make false/unfounded attacks on the students character ( that would be grounds for disciplinary action against the prof and/or a law suit ). Likewise, there are bounds of acceptability regarding a student grading a prof.
It also provides a service to people, who, on a VERY slim chance find their future teacher on that site, to be informed about what is coming up...
IMO, this is the wrong way to go about it. If there is no disclosure policy on student evaluations, there should be. This would be more appropriate, and more meaningful/helpful than one of these internet things.
I'd question whether he's "over-reacting". It certainly looks like he's been defamed.
People become corrupt when they think they're operating in secret, just because they can. Expose the secrets to keep the system fair and on its toes at all times.
There are no "secrets".Students fill out evaluation forms every semester, and those forms are given varying degrees of disclosure -- either the faculty/school sees it or in some cases, it's made public.
It's misleading to say that professors can "secretly" do a bad job. If a professor is doing a bad job, it doesn't stay secret for very long.
The university system does do its hardest to screw young people out of money.
Claims that (X) is too expensive in a place like the US are laughable. If you think you can run a University more cheaply and efficiently, go ahead and do it. The fact is though that most Universities are non-profit, and the private Universities have to compete with non-profit state Universities to justify their prices.
Classes are "expensive" because running a University is also "expensive". Dorms are more "expensive" than other housing because their operating costs are also more "expensive". If you can't handle dorm fees, live in an apartment. If you insist on living in a dorm, I guess it's not such a bad deal after all, huh ?
If you have an overfilled run-down classroom and the degrees are worthless, I'd advise you to switch to a real University.
When people say "UNIX", in this context, they really mean "POSIX", which is an IEEE standard that, supposedly, defines the function call interface between a program and an operating system. That's the general idea.
Except that UNIX has moved on since POSIX, and the latest sepcification is UNIX 98, which requires what one would think of as the "core UNIX APIs" to be available.
POSIX at the very least is a good start, and with a couple of other APIs thrown in , one can usually get workable code.
Even with seamless remote access, NT isn't UNIX. If you don't believe me, try to compile a hello world UNIX program on NT. OK, now try adding SYS V IPC. Now try adding some APIs like curses and X11. The main diff is that NT is win32 based and UNIX isn't.
I suppose if M$ was to actually provide a near full implementation of a unix shell, filesystem, and command line utilities, it could be argued that NT would be, indeed, a UNIX.
They would also need the core APIs and X11. There is a specification called "X/Open" which is far more reaching than POSIX, that you must sort-of comply with to be seen as a "real" UNIX. Microsoft's core is very heavily Win32 based, and as such, it's not going to be anything like UNIX any time soon.
BTW, It's got nothing ( or very little ) to do with kernels. You probably could beat the NT kernel into something upon which you could build a UNIX system.
I'm not clear on whether high-level porting really is that hard -- if it's from one UNIX to the next. Of course, porting something like GCC that requires a lot of low level code is nontrivial.
Provided you are working high level, cross-platform APIs ( which should behave the same on all UNIXs ), and you don't try to code to several different APIs [1] then I don't see why it should be so hard. There are differences in the way different UNIXs handle many things [2] but there are toolkits like Qt and glib that take care of the low-level portability stuff and provide their own data-types and functions.
Just for fun, I grepped for #ifdef directives in krn and there were hardly any ( and the ones I saw weren't about portability issues ).
[1] this is why the vim code is so complex -- they are simoultaneously coding for motif, gtk, athena, ncurses, and win32 without using any high level portability tools ( because there's none that are portable across all target platforms ).
[2] An example -- many C++ compilers still have either nonfunctional or incomplete STL implementations. Another example -- some UNIXs ship with different DBMs ( ndbm,dbm,gdbm ).
Sure, sales don't equal profits, but, even if the industry were only pulling a $1 profit per disc sold, they'd've cleared $1.4 billion dollars. What do you consider a "profit leader"?
1.4 billion for an entire industry certainly does not make it a "profit leader". Take a look at some earnings reports from some major companies -- several are pulling in more than this.
At one point, every family had at least one musician. Most middle-class homes had a piano; virtually no home was so poor that it didn't have at least one instrument, and someone to play it. But the popularity of heavily promoted popular music has had a devestating effect on home-made music.
If this is true, why do we see so many high school bands these days ? And some of these bands are darned good. Most of the students in them will not become professional musicians. They just do it to broaden their education. I also did this and don't regret it.
Too many people see making music as a brass ring - that you make music in hope of making a huge pile of money. The vast majority will not, and forget the main reason to make music - pleasure.
Yeah yeah yeah... teachers should do it for love, professors should do it for love, so should doctors. And many of them do. But all of these guys would be equally pissed off if you said "you have no right to make money in your line of work. Get a real job".
Copyrights, patents and trademarks are not natural rights, although some people would disagree with that, they are legal inventions for the benefit of the public.
What are "natural rights" ? Who says that the right to property of any kind is a moral absolute ? I put it to you that it isn't. It's also a "legal invention for the benefit of the public", though perhaps a somewhat older such invention. Other rights like the "right" to free speech are somewhat newer.
IMO, the significant benefit of copyright is that it provides a means for authors of creative works to claim compensation, and as such, furthers the development of such works. It also allows ordinary people to dollar-vote for such works, whereas further back, the musicians could only write what the aristocracy wanted them to, because patronage is something only the wealthy can sponsor. I call this a "significant benefit to society".
you can stay there with the dingos and whatnot...we'll run the show from here !
I bet there's more bears in your hometown than there are dingos in mine, if you get my drift. As for "we'll run the show", this kind of nationalist mentality is good for people with small penises. I bet you are not one of the guys "running the show".
his is factually incorrect. Digital Creations is doing smashing as consultants with their open-source package, Zope.
Firstly, you've only offered one example. But also, I'd like to see some evidence that they are profitable. What is their stock symbol ? ( Or, if they're private, where can I see their income/cashflow statements ? )
I'm originally from Australia, and I'd like to go back there. Not everyone is a wannabee American. ( btw, most of the immigration into the US is from the third world -- China, India and Mexico. I can understand why those guys wanna get out. )
What you are asking for is to create something with no monetary value and to receive monetary compensation for doing it. That's just plain broken.
If the market is willing to pay for their music, then I would guess that their music does have "some monetary value". It's easy for someone who's never produced anything creative in his entire life ( like most slashdot monkeys ) to poo-poo creative work and say it "has no value". And that's a good point of view to hold if you want to live in a society devoid of creative work.
No-one should make music for money.
Yeah, and no one should teach or be a doctor or whatever for money. Everyone should do whatever they're doing ( unless it's not an honourable profession ) just for the love of it. But we all have to put food on the table, you know.
If I want to duplicate an MP3, I have to invest diskspace (which I have already paid for), bandwidth (which I'm paying for anyway), and CPU time (ditto). The cost of production is negligible..
Don't fool yourself -- when you copy an MP3, you are not producing creative work anymore than a monkey who imitates Einstein is doing theoretical physics.
Slashdot Mirror
In summary, the premise of your argument is completely false.
Another point I should make -- profs rarely let their preconceptions about a student influence their grading. When I'm doing the grading, my primary goal is to get the work done as quickly as possible without being unfair. I have a given quiz graded before I see the name on it -- reading the name is a waste of time. The point is that you can't spend too much time daydreaming about all your students when you have 150 test papers on your desk. 5 minutes per test is already 12.5 hours worth of work. IOW, it's not because the profs are all really ethical and scrupulous -- it's that they don't have the time or inclination to meditate on every single student when there's a pile of ungraded papers on their desk.
There's a good reason for a nondisclosure period. The point is that the prof shouldn't be able to see the results until the grades are in. Note that unless it's the prof's first year on the job, the professor will have built up a track record one way or the other.
Besides, who's going to disparage a bad professor on the official U reviews?
As someone who's been reviewed, I can inform you that the students don't seem unwilling to speak their minds ( either way ) on those reviews.
They'de collected before grades are entered
Sure, because they need to be filled out when the class is still in session ( ie before its broken up and hence before grades are out ).
However, the prof isn't allowed to see the reviews until the grades are in ( this is true at every school I've been at. I bet it's true with yours -- check !!! )
Unless he's tenured, that is.
WRONG. Tenured or not, the profs are still subject to the same evaluation process, and the fact that a prof is tenured does not imply that their evaluations are undisclosed.
Because funding is going down and costs are going up.
Half of them are there because they couldn't make it in the real world
The university is very much "real-world". I don't know which crappy school you go to, but at the good schools, professors publish cutting-edge research in cutting-edge journals. They're hardly a bunch of deadbeats.
I teach. The reviews aren't available to instructors until after the course is over. IMO, traditional evaluations are much better ( for the students, the prof and the university ) than this online junk.
BTW, you got the other part right -- we're not stupid, and if you have distinctive handwriting, there's a good chance we can tell who you are. We get so many students that we don't take the opinions of individual students terribly personally though.
Nothing. In fact this is already done -- some schools offer teaching evaluations online. The big deal is that the content is allegedly false and defamatory. On the other hand , underground reviews and summaries of student evaluations are not typically peppered with illiteracy, defamatory remarks, and foul language.
It appears to me that the professor does have a case, though he has the rather difficult task of demonstrating that he was hurt by the material , to get a damages award. Getting a court order to have the comments removed is probably easier, though ironically, he's drawing more attention to those comments in the process !
You can have the department / faculty tie perks/promotions to the grades received from students. This will make them start to "care" about the opinions of the students pretty quickly. I don't believe the website is very helpful because web polls are notoriously biased and suffer from all sorts of ballot stuffing and representative-sample issues -- and this one is certainly no exception. On the other hand, student evaluations can often work quite well.
No it doesn't. It represents the professors appraisal of the student's work. Such an appraisal should be objective and should NOT by any means make false/unfounded attacks on the students character ( that would be grounds for disciplinary action against the prof and/or a law suit ). Likewise, there are bounds of acceptability regarding a student grading a prof.
IMO, this is the wrong way to go about it. If there is no disclosure policy on student evaluations, there should be. This would be more appropriate, and more meaningful/helpful than one of these internet things.
I'd question whether he's "over-reacting". It certainly looks like he's been defamed.
There are no "secrets".Students fill out evaluation forms every semester, and those forms are given varying degrees of disclosure -- either the faculty/school sees it or in some cases, it's made public.
It's misleading to say that professors can "secretly" do a bad job. If a professor is doing a bad job, it doesn't stay secret for very long.
Claims that (X) is too expensive in a place like the US are laughable. If you think you can run a University more cheaply and efficiently, go ahead and do it. The fact is though that most Universities are non-profit, and the private Universities have to compete with non-profit state Universities to justify their prices.
Classes are "expensive" because running a University is also "expensive". Dorms are more "expensive" than other housing because their operating costs are also more "expensive". If you can't handle dorm fees, live in an apartment. If you insist on living in a dorm, I guess it's not such a bad deal after all, huh ?
If you have an overfilled run-down classroom and the degrees are worthless, I'd advise you to switch to a real University.
Except that UNIX has moved on since POSIX, and the latest sepcification is UNIX 98, which requires what one would think of as the "core UNIX APIs" to be available.
POSIX at the very least is a good start, and with a couple of other APIs thrown in , one can usually get workable code.
Even with seamless remote access, NT isn't UNIX. If you don't believe me, try to compile a hello world UNIX program on NT. OK, now try adding SYS V IPC. Now try adding some APIs like curses and X11. The main diff is that NT is win32 based and UNIX isn't.
They would also need the core APIs and X11. There is a specification called "X/Open" which is far more reaching than POSIX, that you must sort-of comply with to be seen as a "real" UNIX. Microsoft's core is very heavily Win32 based, and as such, it's not going to be anything like UNIX any time soon.
BTW, It's got nothing ( or very little ) to do with kernels. You probably could beat the NT kernel into something upon which you could build a UNIX system.
Provided you are working high level, cross-platform APIs ( which should behave the same on all UNIXs ), and you don't try to code to several different APIs [1] then I don't see why it should be so hard. There are differences in the way different UNIXs handle many things [2] but there are toolkits like Qt and glib that take care of the low-level portability stuff and provide their own data-types and functions.
Just for fun, I grepped for #ifdef directives in krn and there were hardly any ( and the ones I saw weren't about portability issues ).
[1] this is why the vim code is so complex -- they are simoultaneously coding for motif, gtk, athena, ncurses, and win32 without using any high level portability tools ( because there's none that are portable across all target platforms ).
[2] An example -- many C++ compilers still have either nonfunctional or incomplete STL implementations. Another example -- some UNIXs ship with different DBMs ( ndbm,dbm,gdbm ).
1.4 billion for an entire industry certainly does not make it a "profit leader". Take a look at some earnings reports from some major companies -- several are pulling in more than this.
If this is true, why do we see so many high school bands these days ? And some of these bands are darned good. Most of the students in them will not become professional musicians. They just do it to broaden their education. I also did this and don't regret it.
Too many people see making music as a brass ring - that you make music in hope of making a huge pile of money. The vast majority will not, and forget the main reason to make music - pleasure.
Yeah yeah yeah ... teachers should do it for love, professors should do it for love, so should doctors. And many of them do. But all of these guys would be equally pissed off if you said "you have no right to make money in your line of work. Get a real job".
What are "natural rights" ? Who says that the right to property of any kind is a moral absolute ? I put it to you that it isn't. It's also a "legal invention for the benefit of the public", though perhaps a somewhat older such invention. Other rights like the "right" to free speech are somewhat newer.
IMO, the significant benefit of copyright is that it provides a means for authors of creative works to claim compensation, and as such, furthers the development of such works. It also allows ordinary people to dollar-vote for such works, whereas further back, the musicians could only write what the aristocracy wanted them to, because patronage is something only the wealthy can sponsor. I call this a "significant benefit to society".
I bet there's more bears in your hometown than there are dingos in mine, if you get my drift. As for "we'll run the show", this kind of nationalist mentality is good for people with small penises. I bet you are not one of the guys "running the show".
Firstly, you've only offered one example. But also, I'd like to see some evidence that they are profitable. What is their stock symbol ? ( Or, if they're private, where can I see their income/cashflow statements ? )
I'm originally from Australia, and I'd like to go back there. Not everyone is a wannabee American. ( btw, most of the immigration into the US is from the third world -- China, India and Mexico. I can understand why those guys wanna get out. )
If the market is willing to pay for their music, then I would guess that their music does have "some monetary value". It's easy for someone who's never produced anything creative in his entire life ( like most slashdot monkeys ) to poo-poo creative work and say it "has no value". And that's a good point of view to hold if you want to live in a society devoid of creative work.
No-one should make music for money.
Yeah, and no one should teach or be a doctor or whatever for money. Everyone should do whatever they're doing ( unless it's not an honourable profession ) just for the love of it. But we all have to put food on the table, you know.
Don't fool yourself -- when you copy an MP3, you are not producing creative work anymore than a monkey who imitates Einstein is doing theoretical physics.