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"Excellent" profs scarce at Metro Teacher evaluations vety difficult to score perfectly on, professors question test's accuracy Trisha McCarty The METROPOLITAN Why can't Metro have any excellent teachers? Some faculty blame technical flaws in the new faculty evaluation process, which was implemented last spring. Evaluations completed by students at the end of each semester may hinder teachers' chances of receiving a perfect score of six, equating excellence, said journalism professor James Brodell. Other faculty members claim that impractical mathematical operations are used on the gathered data, creating the unlikely score which could ultimately influence salary, retention and tenure. Brodell raised the "excellence" question after reviewing his own results from' last spring's evaluations. "Since evaluations have a tendency to reflect on salary, I think some changes are in order," he said. "Ultimately, if not all, in some ways it affects pay; if your student evaluations say 'good' how can the department chair say you are an excellent teacher?" Brodell sent an e-mail on Sept. 12 to Vincent P. Orlando, chair of the faculty senate evaluation committee and Metro reading professor, and to other faculty, in which he said: ''There is little likelihood that MSCD will have any excellent teachers under the rating system. Under the new faculty evaluation system, a teacher must obtain straight sixes to be ranked excellent." Orlando said he disagreed with Brodell's literal interpretation. "No one is going to say, 'No people are excellent,"' Orlando said. "No one ever got a seven on the old evaluations, but that doesn't mean none were excellent."
Under the old system, each faculty member received a number generated by their evaluations, but the numbers were not assigned a meaning such as excellent or fair. It \Vas left up to each department to determine the number's characterization. However, the new system assigns qualities to numbers, said Norman E. Pence, Metro associate professor of computer information systems and management, making it very difficult for teachers to get an A, so to speak. 路 In terms of grading faculty, an A would only be given with a perfect score of six. A point loss would plunge faculty into the next category of 5.9 to 5.0, meaning very good, and so on, Brodell explained in his e-mail. He said that the students report in categories which are converted to whole numbers, yet are finally reported with two decimal places. "I do not think this is sound mathematically," said Brodell. He also refuted the unimportance of excellence. ''The percentage of your raise varies depending on the area of teacher you find yourself in," Brodell said. "Can you skew it ( the evaluations)? I suppose so, if a teacher brought doughnuts to class everyday," Brodell suggested. Director of Institutional Research Paul Wilken compared the evaluation process to a grade point average, describing it as "near impossible to get an A, very difficult. It all depends on where you want to round." The formula is statistically unsound, said Brodell. "Numbers are being arbitrarily applied and how do students perceive the distance to each category? How much distance is
See EVALUATIONS page 5
Signs of fall .....-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John McDonough/The METROPOLITAN A student walks in the early morning sun as indications of fall start appearing around campus. Fall officially begins Monday but the early snow storm Wednesday felt like winter.
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