Letters

Wednesday, November 25, 1998

Letters

UCLA has inept form for evaluations

Your article "Promotions, tenures depend on accurate student
evaluations" (Nov. 18), which quoted me, also quoted Teresa
Dawson-Munoz of the Office of Instructional Development (OID)
saying, "National literature … suggests that there are no
correlations between teachers giving high grades and students
giving them high evaluations." It further quoted English chair Tom
Wortham calling such correlations a "myth."

In fact, though, a study published a year ago in the American
Psychological Association’s journal (and reported in the major
media) did show a correlation between inflated grades and more
favorable evaluations. It also discussed how this problem could be
avoided, but only if universities design their evaluation systems
with care.

UCLA has never done that. Its evaluation forms are among the
crudest in use anywhere (they don’t even ask, for instance, whether
instructors challenge students intellectually), and the office
Dawson-Munoz works for, OID, regularly crunches numbers from them
without subjecting these even to the most basic tests to make sure
they’re statistically valid.

Asked about this, OID passes the buck to departments, which in
turn pass the buck back to OID as publisher of the form. No one
ever seriously tries to justify UCLA’s system, despite numerous
critiques from me and others and the vast research literature that
Dawson-Munoz misrepresents. Instead, departments like Wortham’s,
and the Academic Senate’s Council on Academic Personnel – at least
when dealing with non-tenured undergraduate instructors – seize on
evaluations in simple-minded and reductionistic ways, reading them
highly selectively in support of their own agendas.

The bad results of this go beyond grade inflation. Since
students are more likely to form negative opinions of a class to
the degree that they are disengaged from it – uninterested, absent,
or otherwise preoccupied – the effect of the present system is
greatly to exaggerate the opinions of poorer students over those of
better and more attentive ones. The system, in short, underwrites
administrators’ laziness (or worse), and ultimately works to
subvert the university’s own professed values.

Jeff Smith

Lecturer

Writing Programs

Drafting only men example of blatant sexism

My applause to Lisa Silver ("Vestiges of chivalry seen in war,"
Nov. 23) for pointing out the discrimination in the all-male draft.
Of the 58,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial, only eight are female.
And that number is an understatement, because more vets committed
suicide since the war than died in the war, and many survivors are
among the homeless, who are 85 percent male. The common response
that "men make war" is hardly supported by polls that show, for
instance, that 76 percent of women favored sending troops to the
Gulf War. To quote Dr. Warren Farrel ("The Myth of Male Power"):
"Registering all our 18-year-old sons for the draft in the event
the country needs more soldiers is as sexist as registering all our
18-year-old daughters for child-bearing in the event the country
needs more children."

Marc Angelucci

Second-year

Law School

Comments, feedback, problems?

© 1998 ASUCLA Communications Board[Home]