In response to the many debates on ugrad quality

[eudean]

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A whooping 62.1% are, at the least, “satisfied,” with the “quality of faculty instruction.” And that’s without most departments releasing their faculty’s ratings! So perhaps what you really mean is that releasing ratings will be a “huge benefit” to “many students.”

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<p>Okay, it will be a huge benefit to any student who otherwise would’ve been stuck with a bad professor at some point during their college career. That would be significant portion of the campus, and I don’t think “almost every” would be overexaggerating that number.</p>

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OK. I accept that. Now I would like to know how much NKH costs EECS. If it’s a lot, how are smaller (especially humanities) departments going to pay for such a system? Would the central administration pay?

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<p>The system consists of: one or two students per class to pass out, then collect scantrons; the scantrons themselves; a scantron machine (though I’m sure departments could share a machine–there’s no rush to scan these things); someone to scan the forms; and a website with the code running the HKN website.</p>

<p>We already have students that gladly volunteer to pass out and collect scantrons. Scantrons are relatively cheap, even if we got all 22,000 students to participate that’d be around $2,000 total for the scantrons (their website indicates that they’re around 10 cents a piece in bundles of 500). Any administrative secretary could scan the forms. I don’t know how much a scantron machine costs, but considering their usage on campus already, I doubt we couldn’t get by with using existing machines. Websites cost nil, and the software is free (GPL license).</p>

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If few students are affected, it’s relatively unlikely that the departments themselves OR “Berkeley” will seriously attempt to solve problem by releasing faculty ratings.

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<p>Professor Chang-Hasnain, who’s taught EE40 (~100 students) at least twice, has 4 ratings. Gastpar, who’s taught 120 (~100 students) at least 3 times, has 9 ratings. I think it’s pretty clear ratemyprofessors.com is lackluster at best.</p>

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Make no mistake about it, not one of the impacted “departments” with the probable exception of Mass Communications are short on money.

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<p>PROVE IT! You say you’re not just guessing, so show me, how are you not ignorant of the costs necessary to run these departments and their budgets?</p>

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I believe they want to be number one and the decision to declare themselves impacted was so that they would have to teach fewer classes and focus more on research. Again, as I’ve already stated, I suspect that the Econ department feels the same way.

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<p>Have quotes, do you? References? I’d like to know. If that’s the case, then I’d say it’s a trade-off, bad for undergraduate education certainly, but since Berkeley is research-oriented, I could understand the trade-off.</p>

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Look. The reality of the situation is that departments that don’t use laboratories don’t really need THAT much money. Now, I’m not an economics major and I’m certainly no expert on economics, but from what I gather, undergraduate economic classes are usually made up of Lecture and Discussion. No Lab.

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<p>How much money do they need? How much money do they get? I’m well aware that econ classes don’t have labs (what the heck would they do in a lab?). How much do their professors get paid? GSIs? Is it more costly to hire prestigious econ faculty than comparable faculty in other fields? Do you know?</p>

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In the end, you’ve got to realize that the “realistic cost per student number” for the Econ department is a VERY SMALL sum and Econ DEFINETLY has much more money than said sum.

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<p>I’ll believe you if you give me some type of evidence to back your claims. I don’t know the economics department budget. I don’t know how much it costs to educate a class of students. You haven’t told me those things, either. You’ve given me some vague reasons to believe it costs less to run an economics department than it does a chemistry department.</p>

<p>Also, I don’t know if it makes sense to say that the economics department has the resources to be a non-impacted major. If saying that comes with a qualifier like “if they moved 20% of their research budget into their education budget”, then that effectively means, to me, that they don’t have enough money. Having enough money would mean allowing them to perform top research and to support so many students. It’s like saying Berkeley has enough money to educate everyone in the city of Berkeley, if we stopped doing research, bought out 10 warehouses to make into classrooms, and promoted every grad student to a professor. Well, yeah, you can now educate everyone in the city, but I wouldn’t really say you had the resources to do it in the sense that you could maintain quality everywhere else in your program.</p>