Do the best professors get the worst ratings (from students)?

RacinReaver
Mon, 03 Jun 2013 12:26:31 +0000

The authors speculate that the more experienced professors tend to “broaden the curriculum and produce students with a deeper understanding of the material.” (p. 430) That is, because they don’t teach directly to the test, they do worse in the short run but better in the long run.

To summarize the findings: because they didn’t teach to the test, the professors who instilled the deepest learning in their students came out looking the worst in terms of student evaluations and initial exam performance. To me, these results were staggering, and I don’t say that lightly.



I think this could explain some of my professors. They didn’t teach us anything in the classroom, so we were forced to try and learn everything on our own. Oftentimes we wound up learning all sorts of random things because we didn’t actually know what we were supposed to be learning for the course. Getting the skill to teach yourself at an intro-level class will definitely pay more dividends for the future than learning only the material covered in a class.