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socrates2016

Have a Berkeley math degree. Two observations. Student ratings are whack. I had a professor I thought was really good but had an average rating. I had one fellow student state that he hated the professor. I am pretty sure the professor did nothing to him that deserved that hatred. People don't like it when they don't do as well as they expect. Second, it appears that the math department hires based on research because I had a newly minted professor who was just plain indecipherable.

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I have a triple major from Cal with math among them. All I can say is that Berkeley math classes were the most brutal, boring, and demotivating classes that I've ever encountered. For the longest time I tried to suck it up and blame myself. Luckily, since then I've had enough great classes and mentors to realize it really was the department and its professors that made me miserable, and I overcame the massive GPA drop and near-suicidal tendencies that Berkeley Math drove me to.

You've voiced my own feelings exactly.

Conventional wisdom among teachers is that ratings are mainly a function of the grades that students expect to receive in the course. I was in the room when two profs were discussing their grading policies, and one of them flat-out wanted to give easy grades because he was coming up on tenure.

I found this snippet from an open letter he wrote to the Mathematics Department in the past:

> you instructed me to show a draft of my final to another very eminent member of faculty and former winner of the distinguished teaching award. His comment on a draft that contained 8 questions was that it was already too long and too hard, and should be no longer. I had originally been planning on asking 15 or so questions, including some difficult ones, but I was not allowed to do so. In the end we settled on 12 questions. The result of this intervention by you and other faculty was that the median score was over 90%, and in order to keep to departmental grade distributions I had to set the A- cutoff at 93%

The implication here seems to be that his final exam was notably harder than is typical and yet he was forced to throttle the cutoff for an A- to enforce regulated grade distributions (which in and of itself is a horrendous policy).

The letter is here:

http://alexandercoward.com/OpenLetter.pdf

I think it's hard to ignore this in combination with the highest teaching scores anyone in the department has received in apparently 18 years.

Too many universities fail to teach and only use unreasonably challenging tests to filter students.

You know you have an exemplary teacher when his students start owning these crazy tests. This is what every educational institution should strive for. Teaching is an art, and this man represents the epitome of the art.

That's the case at every university; students are, for the most part, whiny entitled drunk and high children -- especially in intro classes. Giving their opinions influence over an adult's career is absolutely insane.

The skillset required to really get through to kids like that is entirely divorced from teaching more advanced classes or research: it's half nannying and half high-school football coach with a splash of the subject material.

And every department hires almost entirely based on research they have to more and more as budgets are slashed since research is their only opportunity to bring in more funding.

Student ratings for undergrad math in particular are problematic because courses like 1* and 16* are mostly taken by students majoring in non-math subjects who are only taking the course because they are required to pass it.

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