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UCSD Professors Get Good Marks in Student Critiques : Evaluations: Results from 70,000 student surveys on more than 1,600 courses show about 80% of undergraduates recommend classes, teachers to peers.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

UC San Diego Professor James Lyon has a passion for good teaching.

Lyon believes that most of his colleagues share that feeling despite the wide currency given critics of major research universities who say teaching is merely a sidelight to a professor’s other academic interests.

Now Lyon, one of five UCSD college provosts who oversee the quality of undergraduate instruction, has strong evidence for his view from the group on campus most affected by the attitude of professors: the students.

During the last five years, more than 80% of UCSD undergraduates have recommended to their peers the courses and professors they have taken, and even those in large introductory science and humanities lectures with more than 200 students rated the professors as satisfactory or better.

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These and other figures result from a major new UCSD analysis of data gathered yearly by the student-run CAPE organization (Course and Professor Evaluation). The students, whose work is funded by the university, autonomously compile an annual book, culling results from almost 70,000 student evaluations on each of the more than 1,600 courses taught on the campus each year.

At $1 a copy, the 500-page CAPE book may be the least expensive document sold at the UCSD bookstore--and the most influential. Published since 1973, it is considered a model for similar student evaluations both within the UC system and at other major institutions across the country.

Students use CAPE to select classes and professors. Individual professors and academic departments study both the statistics and comments from students to improve their teaching and to make course assignments. The UCSD Academic Senate requires departments to consider CAPE results in evaluating professors for promotions and merits, and the university makes available special help to faculty members who want to improve their teaching performance.

UCSD administrators have now taken CAPE’s use one step further to judge the overall teaching mission of the campus, by analyzing all CAPE evaluations from fall 1983 to spring 1988--the years for which data has been stored electronically.

“I happen to feel that some of the best teaching that is taking place in this country occurs at this university specifically and at (small) colleges generally,” said Lyon, provost of UCSD’s Fifth College. Lyon added that he believes the “occasional horror stories” about terrible professors at UCSD “are often amplified to tar everyone with the same brush.”

“I know (the conclusions) sound self-congratulatory, but we’re monitored here with these student-run CAPEs. When you get between 80% and 90% satisfaction rates with your consumers, I happen to think we’re doing rather well.”

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Among the significant findings from the data, which covered 6,633 courses and 121,814 student responses to the two-page CAPE survey distributed in almost every course:

* Just under 86% of students said they would recommend their courses, and 82% would recommend the professors. The smallest classes--20 or fewer students--received the highest rankings, with 90% recommending the courses and 91% the professors.

* Although percentages declined as class size increased, the largest classes with more than 200 students received slightly higher recommendations--85% for course and 80% for professor--than did courses with 101 to 200 students. Lyon and other professors said that, at UCSD, academic departments deliberately assign their best professors--in both knowledge and showmanship--to the largest courses to minimize alienation that students might feel in classes they have no choice but to take.

“It’s never been true on this campus that we’ve put a new assistant professor into a large survey course, and it’s not true in most good universities . . . you get your very good, senior people to teach those courses,” said Stanley Chodorow, dean of the arts and humanities division.

* The amount of work required in a course seems to have no effect on its approval rating. The CAPE survey asks students the average hours of study time per week. Professors who require less than the average weekly study time were given an 81.92% endorsement, while those who required more than the average amount received an 81.90% rating.

* Whether students think their teaching assistants were good or bad has no effect on their feelings about the course or the professor. Administrators conclude that students evaluate a course much more on the basis of the professor than of a teaching assistant. Ratings for teaching assistants increased from 3.53 to 3.71 over the five-year period, on a scale of 1 to 5, reflecting what UCSD believes are improvements in English-language speaking ability on the part of many foreign graduate teaching assistants. Mandatory testing in English is now required for all teaching assistants.

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* Courses and professors in the departments of history and literature received the highest ratings, in the low 90s. Linguistics, the smallest department on campus, ranked lowest, at 79%, for course recommendations, while mathematics, at 75%, was the lowest department in recommendation of professors.

Across disciplines, humanities and fine arts rated the highest for professor recommendations, followed by social sciences, natural sciences and engineering.

Provost David Wong of UCSD’s Warren College said that, in part, students in science and engineering majors have fewer options on what undergraduate courses they can take because the curriculum is highly structured.

Wong, a physicist, said the course material in many undergraduate science classes “is very far from application, from the interesting topics you read about in the paper . . . in science, you have to build the knowledge foundation in a very painstaking fashion, and therefore it’s harder to be a great lecturer” than in the arts and humanities.

There is near unanimity among the UCSD faculty concerning the value of CAPE for their self-evaluation, although somewhat less agreement on its use for merits and promotions.

“I’ve never heard any criticism about how it is put together, and I have none of my own,” said Harold Ticho, UCSD vice chancellor for academic affairs. “And it’s important for credibility’s sake that the students regard it as their own work on how teaching is judged.”

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Student runners fan out across the campus between the seventh and 10th weeks of each quarter, distributing evaluation packets to classes. Students have about 20 minutes to answer 19 specific questions--ranging from a professor’s command of material to speaking and lecture style--as well as write individual comments--all done anonymously. Editors then compile the statistical data as well as cull recurring comments in order to write one or two paragraphs summing up the student consensus in each course.

“No professor can look at any comments until after the final grades are out,” said senior Pam Bennett, one of two co-editors for the present CAPE. The department receives all unedited comments, including occasional notes of the scatological or lovelorn kind, at the end of the year.

Although the work is often tedious, Bennett and her colleague, Dwight Dodge, said the reward comes from seeing the CAPE book on the shelves of every UCSD department.

“I like the feeling in knowing that people are reading it,” Bennett said, adding that the CAPE office even receives one or two calls a week from other campuses interested in their process.

“CAPE shows at least the administration is interested in teaching and it also eliminates some of the image” that a university with a research emphasis cannot also have good teaching, she said.

Tom Bond, chemistry associate professor and Revelle College provost, said that, even after 28 years of teaching, he still learns new ways of reaching students as a result of CAPE, although he consistently has received high CAPE marks--and special salary increases--as a result of outstanding teaching. For example, he now teaches problem-solving sessions to avoid going over the same problem again and again with individual students, losing his patience by the nth student.

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Individuals learn that they can improve their writing, or change the way they stand in front of the blackboard, or find out they need to use a microphone in order to be heard clearly, he said. Others need to integrate their lectures better with reading or writing assignments, he said.

For more major problems, “there are two kinds of things in particular (for improvement) that often come out from the ratings, which I believe are taken quite seriously by departments,” Bond said.

In one instance, an assistant professor new to a course has forgotten what it was like to learn the material and pitches the class for too sophisticated a level for freshmen. In such cases, Bond said, colleagues often can help the person enormously, or can recommend videotaping and counseling by the two-person teaching development center on campus, originally set up to aid graduate student teaching assistants.

“At the other end is the very eminent scholar who is just not the right person to be teaching a large undergraduate course and only does it because the department requires it. Most departments try to keep those people out of (such courses)” and instead put them in smaller upper-division classes or seminars where they will be more successful, Bond said.

“If you’ve been teaching math for 35 years, it’s sometimes hard to relate to a 17-year-old struggling with calculus for the first time,” he said.

Bond said students quickly pick up on a professor who does not care or who has used the same lecture for several years.

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“I know it is hard to be tops at both research and teaching at the same time,” Bond said, “and for a professor trying to build a reputation, research does count for more. But there are financial rewards here for good teaching.”

Glenn Sueyoshi, an assistant economics professor in his third year at UCSD, has received ratings in the high 90s for his courses in statistics, a subject difficult for professors to teach creatively.

“I try hard to show students that statistics is something they have been doing all their lives, but they don’t (realize) it, and to show that it is a lot of intuition,” Sueyoshi said. “I was a little bit surprised” at the ratings, he said, “since I thought there would be a larger contingent of students who would hate the course.”

But Sueyoshi said that, although he enjoys teaching, he keeps uppermost in his mind that a decision on tenure during the next several years will depend mainly on how his department evaluates his research.

“Teaching will only help you on the margin, despite the pride you take,” Sueyoshi said. “But one comes to UCSD with his eyes open in regard to that.”

History Department Chairman Alden A. Mosshammer said that “teaching has to play second fiddle to research” in deciding promotions at a research university such as UCSD. But he said an unusually good teaching record will be rewarded financially when a professor is evaluated every two or three years, “even when someone has not been as productive with scholarship as they might have been.”

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“We are also careful in making appointments,” Mosshammer said, “that we find people who care about teaching and want to teach.”

Mathematics Department Vice Chairman Norman Shenk said he pays close attention to CAPE comments, even though he believes its emphasis on overall percentages discounts the professor who may only “turn on” one out of five students, but “gives those 20% of students who care the best course they may have ever had.”

Shenk himself does not receive good ratings--some years his ratings drop into the 60% range--”and so often it is a constant puzzle for me, since I always try to respond to what the students are saying. . . . I am sensitive, since I see people who don’t prepare well yet who get high ratings.”

Academic Senate President Theodore Groves, an economics professor, said he believes some faculty members rated in the 60s or 70s “actually are better” than some close to 100%, the difference reflecting what he feels are higher standards and harder courses for those on the lower end.

“It’s true that, in cases of low CAPEs, you can say that there isn’t a whole lot of education going on,” Groves said. “But I still have some trouble in using them too strongly in the evaluation process.”

Groves said that departments often look with more annoyance on professors who don’t care about low CAPEs than on those who try to improve but find themselves unable to be effective except in the small seminar-type of classes.

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“The dilemma is that, to hold someone back if they are doing good research but only fair teaching, you end up giving them salaries that are below market value, and that will hurt their morale, and they will leave for someplace else, and, if they are a better-than-average researcher, you lose quality,” Groves said.

But Lyon said he believes that some professors overstate fears that the use of CAPE for academic valuations can hurt the university.

“I am aware of only one case where a promotion was deferred because of poor teaching,” Lyon said. “In most cases, a promotion will go through, with a warning, and I have seen these warnings, to tell the professor that he or she must take teaching more seriously.”

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