[Englecturers] FW: Spring Semester Registration

[Gray Scott]

Kate, et al,

>From what my wife and I can tell from the data at PickaProf, the data are accurate but incomplete: They're getting, say, a full classworth of info for a given instructor, but not each class taught by that instructor. This suggests that they aren't getting the data officially from the university (surprise, surprise), but it also suggests they aren't simply reconstructing grades based on student testimonials. Within a given class, the data are complete. 

Our best guess is that they're relying on informants to swipe info from occasional gradesheets, which is why they aren't getting every class we teach. I don't have a second-best guess, because I can't think of one that fits the data.

There are two interesting ramifications to this behavior, if we're guessing right. The first is practical, the second legal. 

The practical ramification: If they're swiping gradesheets, they're going to run out of updates soon, since so many of us (and so many schools) are shifting to electronic grade-posting. 

The legal ramification: It would mean that some employees (and the company) are committing serious violations of FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act). It means someone is looking at a form with specific, individual student grade information on it, without the student's specific, individual permission. I'm starting to wonder whether anyone has filed a tip with the U.S. Department of Education's inspector general yet. It merits that sort of attention. Certainly the students (the legal victims) aren't likely to. (The Dept. of Education's IG can be contacted through this page: http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/focus/online-services.html?src=gu )

As an instructor, I myself am not terribly bothered by this kind of publication of grade distributions. (Well... I'm a little annoyed that they apparently only grabbed two of my classes, both from when I was a fresher instructor and less stingy with grades than I am now, but even with just that data, I appear to be about center-mass for this department, so I suppose it's not a disaster. In some ways, it's a little reassuring.) In some ways, I suspect it might be a long-term good thing to have this sort of information made public across the board. Released by universities officially, disclosure would reduce the threat to student privacy that this sort of alternative presents. It would, as Sandy Baringer noted, probably result in grade decompression across the board, as individuals within departments synchronized, and then as departments became more in sync. And, in the long run, it might defuse a lot of the grade-shopping, grade-grubbing behavior I'm seeing, which seems to draw a lot of its energy from comparisons of instructors. Employed on a massive scale, it might leave RateMyProfessor with only substance to talk about, which is fine by me. At the same time, I cringe at the notion that it might be -- oh heck, would be -- used blindly as a way to measure faculty performance, as if classes don't vary from each other considerably (though they do), and as though employing a range of instructors all with idiosyncratic (but perfectly valid) teaching philosophies should produce identical results. And I want a good range of teaching philosophies out there, just as I want competition among ideas in any other arena. Put bluntly, I like the idea of instructors looking at this sort of information and using it to pace each other, building greater uniformity on their own initiative, but I wouldn't want a mandate. Overall: Tough call. 

And now I've once again typed more than I intended. Back to real work ...

- Gray

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Kate Watt 
  To: sbaringer at hughes.net 
  Cc: englecturers at lists.ucr.edu 
  Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 6:14 PM
  Subject: Re: [Englecturers] FW: Spring Semester Registration


  How precisely would a website outside the university get our grade distribution data?  Beyond the anecdotal reports of a few scattered students.  Can they buy or steal such reports for whole classes or whole campuses?  If so, that's pretty creepy!  

  And, by the way, if a commercial website has such statistics, why don't we?  Do we have access to an analysis of our grade spreads, relative to other teachers (as they do at some community colleges)?  Should the self-policing Sandy mentioned have to be the result of a creepy website's input? 

  Kate




  On Jan 14, 2008 9:53 PM, <sbaringer at hughes.net> wrote:

    Pickaprof has actual quantitative data about grade distributions, which is making more people nervous.  You have to subscribe for $10 a year to get access to the grade histories.  I'm guessing that in the long run, the publication of the grade data is more likely to result in grade deflation than inflation, as the worst inflating offenders (many of them tenured) become exposed to peers and administrators outside the direct chain of command.




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