Resources

Several charts and graphs are presented regarding undergraduate education in the U.S. including a graph on marital status of students, a pie chart on part-time student enrollment, and a table which lists percentages for students attending community, public, and private colleges.

Student evaluations of teaching are a common fixture at American law schools, but they harbor surprising biases. Extensive psychology research demonstrates that these assessments respond overwhelmingly to a professor’s appearance and nonverbal behavior; ratings based on just thirty seconds of silent videotape correlate strongly with end-of-semester evaluations. The nonverbal behaviors that influence teaching evaluations are rooted in physiology, culture, and habit, allowing characteristics like race and gender to affect evaluations. The current process of gathering evaluations, moreover, allows social stereotypes to filter students’ perceptions, increasing risks of bias. These distortions are inevitable products of the intuitive, “system one” cognitive processes that the present process taps. The cure for these biases requires schools to design new student evaluation systems, such as ones based on facilitated group discussion, that enable more reflective, deliberative judgments. This article draws upon research in cognitive decision making, both to present the compelling case for reforming the current system of evaluating classroom performance and to illuminate the cognitive processes that underlie many facets of the legal system.

Informal student evaluations of faculty were started in the 1960's by enterprising college students.(1) Since then, their use has spread so that now they are administered in almost all American colleges and universities and are probably the main source of information used for evaluating faculty teaching performance.(2) There is an enormous literature on the subject of student evaluations of faculty (SEF).(3) The following is a summary of some developments in that literature that should be of special interest to faculty, with particular emphasis on criticisms of SEF that have emerged recently. But I begin with the arguments in favor of the use of SEF.

The article discusses associate professors in the U.S., focusing on their overall happiness and attitudes related to their positions. The article cites a study conducted by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard University which provides statistics related to the job satisfaction of associate professors in areas such as leadership, collaboration, and workload. The article explores the tenure track process for college teachers, notes that few personal and professional services are offered to mid-career professors, and provides comments from various associate professors including Judith C. Amburgey-Peters, Karen L. Kelsky, and Margaret Soltan.