Teacher Ratings Website UP!

Hey everyone! After weeks of compiling and sorting through data and putting it into an easy to read format, the website with the teacher ratings is finally up! Just go to sga.umbc.edu/teacherratings to see them. I want to thank all of the people who compiled the data with me, and I want to thank Nikki for making an excellent website. You all are great.

Teacher Ratings Update

Well everyone, after much time, energy, and threats of physical violence, the compilation of the teacher ratings are very nearly complete. All we need to do now is get them up on the web and it will be over. Until that time though, I thought I would give you all a sneak peek of stats I thought were most interesting, the individual department rankings.

As you may know, the data that was used in these ratings were taken from the SCEQ bubble sheets that we all fill out at the end of each semester. The criteria I used in the judging were whether new insights/skills were learned, preparedness of the lectures, instructor interest in the subject, clarity of lecture material, and the overall effectiveness of the instructor. Each of these criteria were weighted differently also- insights, preparedness, and clarity were each 10%, instructor interest was 15%, and overall effectiveness was 55%. Everything is based on a 5 point scale with 5 being the best. The ratings are taken from the results for fall '07.

So, with that explanation out of the way, the top five departments were:

1. Archaeology 4.74/5
2. Greek 4.73/5
3. Admin Studies- Accounting 4.64/5
4. Music 4.63/5
5. EHS 4.56/5
5. Latin 4.56/5

Congratulations to those professors for outstanding work. Now for the bottom five:

46. Computer Science 4.10/5
47. Physical Education 4.05/5
48. Chemistry 3.91/5
49. Science 3.88/5
50. Mech. Engineering 3.87/5

Better luck to those departments. Hopefully they are enjoying a stronger spring semester.

I hope everyone stays tuned for when the site goes up with not only the rest of the department power rankings, but the rankings for the individual teachers as well.

Study Groups- Do they benefit you?

In my time as the Director of Academic Affairs, I have gained a lot of experience in dealing with study groups. A lot of experience. But I wonder, do students actually benefit from them? There are scores of studies touting the positive impact of being in a study group on student's grades. That's nice, but I really would like to hear about experiences with study groups from students themselves. I am in the planning stages of having an application added to myUMBC that would allow students to form study groups through that interface. But I must ask, is this something that students want? So leave some comments, and let me know UMBC, are you in study groups? If so, do you feel benefits from them? If not, why not? I am really interested in your feedback.

Student Course Evaluations

It's that time of the semester again, where all of the professors hand out the white-and-brown quizzes and the blue sheets for you to rate their performance and provide suggestions and feedback for the future. Interestingly, even the music department is required to hand these out, which means there are a lot of "not applicable" bubbles to fill in on the first sheet.

At any rate, the results from these evaluations actually do end up somewhere, meaning that you can actually supplement your ratemyprofessor search by looking up past data for various courses and who was teaching them. The blue sheets, while they take more time to fill out, are probably a little more directly helpful to the professor. Many of them have made changes in the course in subsequent semesters based on this feedback.

Although it seems like an annoyance, I encourage you to take the the time to fill these sheets out. By providing this feedback you help many classes and professors improve.

Welcome Back

I hope everybody had an excellent time and some delicious food over Thanksgiving break. I'm sure this means you're ready to throw yourself back into the work of the semester, right? Ha. At least we can take comfort in the fact that there are now only about two full weeks left in the semester (if you don't count finals). I keep telling myself I can make it that long, but I'm not sure if my Flex dollars will...