[cortesoft]

> Regarding professors wanting to keep review data tightly sealed: in my view, if you can't by public disclosure of your evaluation, then you either don't feel you're meeting expectations, or have no desire to improve in areas where students feel improvement could be made.

There is also the third option, which the author is arguing for: that the professors do not think the ratings are an accurate reflection of their teaching skills.

[mcguire]

I'm sure many professors would agree.

Perhaps the engineering statistics professor I met who bragged that no one ever got an A on his final, because teaching wasa competition between him and the students. And the government professor I had who was inordinately proud of the fact that his course was required because three soldiers from Texas stayed in China after the Korean war and spent the rest of the first class going around the room having students introduce themselves and then mocking them. (I dropped the class the next day.) And a number who were just disorganized and incompetent, but protected by their relationship with other faculty. And the professor who was given tenure for political reasons, after threatening to fail an entire class (of a required course) of computer science undergrads because they weren't electrical engineering great students.

[WalterSear]

I bet the adjunct whose english was so bad that she would just answer a question kind of close to what you asked, as quickly as possible and try and move on would too.

She also answered any questions asked in Mandarin, in Mandarin. When asked to translate an exchange for the rest of the class, she blushed and said 'it was complicated'. At the end of the semester, the class was so far behind, 1/3 of the materials for the course exam were delivered during an optional study session.

And so would the electrophysiology professor who spent over an hour of a grad seminar explaining how to use a floppy disk. Because he had trouble with computers.

[nicoburns]

I've seen a lot of cases where the professors thought exactly that. Unfortunately they were in denial because their teaching skills were abysmal.

I've seen courses where the students were memorising MATLAB scripts by rote for exams because almost none of them had sufficient understanding to have any chance of recreating it in the exam. Why? Because rather than teaching this stuff, the lecturer spent several lectures explaining the details of the representation of floating point number (this was a first-year class for math majors, not people doing CS).

But it was hard as student representatives for us to prove any of this, because we didn't have access to feedback responses.

[Y7ZCQtNo39]

I don't understand how that's a third option because either the review data is open and publicly available, or it isn't.

That 'third option' is just an opinion about the data.