Law in Contemporary Society

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GradingProfessors 10 - 16 Feb 2010 - Main.AlexAsen
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a.k.a. Grading Professors So WE Get Better Feedback

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>		From Eben: " I think it is time to stop expecting to acquire commitment points by writing extensively about how to improve law school without having "actually" been through it. On the plus side, given the baseline . . . some . . . usual chatterers have laid down, you can get improvement points at this stage by writing even badly about substantive subjects. . . . [A]ll the unnecessary verbiage that has been expended on discussing . . . a hypothetical (and quite ridiculous) initiative to use "course evaluations" to improve the quality of educational evaluation - is still obscure to you, as it is to most of your teachers. That's not important here: you're studying to be a lawyer, not an educational reformer. You might want to take up the task in hand."

@Eben Thank you for your guidance. I would like to hear more about why the below idea is "ridiculous," but understand that you do not want the class to go in that direction.

I am not sure where to go now however. Perhaps you can help. While you make a strict distinction between education reform and lawyering, isn't it largely lawyers who write education policy. Certainly law school policy is created and changed by lawyers. From Robinson I took away that a "real lawyer knows how to take care of a legal problem." Advocating for an administrative change to improve a problem is exactly the kind of thing I hope to do as a lawyer. I thought as an aspiring lawyer it is appropriate for me to learn to take care of legal problem. I am thinking about being a lawyer incorrectly or I am thinking about your class incorrectly?

 Students grade professors through course evaluation forms. Maybe we can use these forms to get better feedback from our professors. (The irony that the feedback we give them is already way more instructive than the feedback we receive is not lost on me.) Anyway, through the evaluation forms we give feedback on many different aspects of the professor's performance, but we don't give feedback on how good their feedback to us is. Maybe if we successfully lobby for a "rate your professor's feedback" box on the evaluation forms, we can begin to establish feedback as an important part of a professor's job.

Changing the forms might be a good first step in changing how professor's think about their responsibility. Getting a "feedback given to student" question on the form does not require the university to expend any resources or change any policies. My hunch is, however, that professors are adverse to getting negative evaluations, and after a semester of getting low ratings in the "feedback given to student" category they will evolve. I hope the evolution will not be in the form of a faculty resolution to strip the new category from the evaluations. (Whether cynics or optimists change the world is a question for a different discussion.)


Revision 10r10 - 16 Feb 2010 - 16:35:24 - AlexAsen
Revision 9r9 - 15 Feb 2010 - 19:01:13 - RobLaser
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