Evaluation

Transcript

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Meeting class objectives Monitoring student engagement Seating implications Evaluating class participation		Negative/positive grading Harvard Business School Grading Handout danger Summarizing content at the end of class

Meeting class objectives

PROFESSOR DAVID GARVIN: Now, I judge by a few criteria. First, I spend a lot of time watching body language. Some of the cues are obvious. When lots of heads are going like this, people are probably tracking. When lots of heads are quizzical, they're probably not with you. That’s one important test.

Second test: Does the discussion develop? I often start with a very open, fairly easy question. I want to see where the class is. I want to get some sense of how far along they are. As we get into tougher issues, does the class seem to be moving? If they’re moving, they're getting something. They're not always getting what I think they were supposed to, but that’s OK. What you're doing is you're sort of setting up broad boundaries and you're just hoping they take hold of the issues.

The third, and often a very good test, is the next class. The next class that I teach after this is a case on a company called Time-Life; it was a division of Time Warner. They have multiple divisions, one of which is video TV, the other of which is books. I ask them to contrast the books and video TV division. If they’ve gotten it, the first person to speak says, “Well, it’s pretty clear the video TV division is organic and the books division is mechanistic.” I pause and I say, “Everybody hear those two words? Can we make sure we’re on top of it?” And, yes, the test is often in the next class.

Monitoring student engagement

PROFESSOR FRANCES FREI: So here’s the thing that I do, especially when I teach quantitative methods, but when I teach other things, too. I am just absolutely aware of how everyone is doing.

I am a hawk in watching everybody, so among those things I'm watching is whether or not people are engaged. If you're teaching quantitative things and eyes are glazing over, you're done. I’ll say, “OK, eyes are glazing over. I'm not blaming you. Let’s do what we can to bring it back.”

I would never decide ahead of time what I'm going to do. I'm just staying here in the moment.

Seating implications

PROFESSOR FREI: The seat you're sitting in definitely has an influence, so we put in as many safeguards as we can. For example, on the software, when I go in and do it, I have bias checks. I have left, right, center; low, medium, high; male, female; heavy accent, no heavy accent. I have all these bias checks that will come up to tell me whether the participation is on average varying, the quantity is varying across those, and is the quality varying across those.

Everyone will do it—I might be an extreme. And I teach quantitative stuff, right? Who’s surprised? So, yes, the seat matters, but we do everything we can, and everybody has a thing. If someone hasn’t spoken for the last three classes, a little red star flashes next to their name in our class participation spreadsheets. They're going to get called on, and they know they're going to get called on. So it matters, but we try to do what we can.

Evaluating class participation

PROFESSOR FREI: Participation is evaluated based on willingness, courage, ability to learn, ability to let other people sort of build off of what you've said. So oftentimes, students will have made assumptions, and we’ll get into class and we’ll use assumptions other than the assumptions they’ve made. Are you gracious about letting us use different assumptions, or are you going to be adamant in class that we use the assumptions you made? It’s that sort of thing that we grade the participation on.

Then it’s on whether you have made insightful comments based on what other people have said. What I tell students is, I never want to hear anything you learned the night before, ever. I want to know what came to you during the class. You have a higher chance of having things come to you during the class if you’ve prepared the night before.

Now, that is completely different from how all the students probably got into your university. They got into your university by learning something the night before, coming to class, and telling everybody what they did. But I'm uninterested in that, because that’s not a discussion. That’s how I do it, and that’s how a lot of people I know do it.

Negative/positive grading

PROFESSOR FREI: It’s a five-point scale that I can never hold myself to, so then it becomes with halves in between. But I use a five-point scale. Importantly, you can get negative points if you detract from the learning. And I'm very open with the students about how I do this. [There are] a couple of ways of detracting from the learning, because detracting from the learning is death. So detracting from the learning is, we’re here, we’re all together, we’re all participating, and somebody gets up and leaves. We all are going to watch that person. That person will have drawn attention away from the discussion. Negative points.

So there are a lot of ways. And in a lecture, if I were lecturing, I would not care if somebody left, because they're just leaving me. But if Victor leaves while Gustavo is talking, Victor just did something to Gustavo. It’s my obligation to do something about that.

There’s also, when the class is going on, and let’s say Mario really wanted to get in, and he finally gets in, and he brings up a point back here—negative points. He would have been selfish at the expense of the group learning. So it’s a five-point scale, but one of them is negative.

It’s hard-core, but I have to tell you, it’s not that hard to do, and the environment you create—and I do it here. I did this when I taught at Wharton and no one else was teaching like this at Wharton, and I did it, and the students loved it. Because they want to be challenged; the world wants to be challenged, frankly. They want to be challenged in a fair way, and it’s a magical thing if you're transparent about how you do it. The transparency is the key.

Harvard Business School Grading

PROFESSOR FREI: Usually halfway through the course, students will get a letter. So we give grades of one, two, or three. It's a forced curve. Twenty percent get the top grade of a one; 70 percent get the middle grade of a two; 10 percent get the bottom grade of a three. The administration says that’s not failing, but the students think it’s failing. And it is. Anyway, 10 percent fail every class, by forced curve. Your grades get bounced back if you don’t have it. And if as a student you collect too many threes, you hit the screen, and you get into academic difficulty. So what we do is midway through the semester we write a letter and tell them where they’re going towards, and give them a little helpful advice.

Handout danger

PROFESSOR JIM HESKETT: That's one of the things that concerns me about one element of our teaching. When I say ours, I mean ours. It concerns me about what I see happening in some of our classrooms, and you often see it with the least-experienced instructors. And that is the slide deck at the end of the class. At the extreme, a slide deck at the end of each class containing information about what we should have just learned, and what kinds of conclusions we might draw from what we’ve just discussed, with a real attempt to deliver a product, in a sense. Deliver a product.

PROFESSOR TOM PIPER: I tend to do it at the end and I worry about exactly what Alberto says, based on what Jim talked with you about, that somehow or other when I put that kind of content up there, people begin to say, “All right, that's the primary take-away.” And then it’s not too long before they begin to say, “And therefore, why don't I just skim the case so that if I get called on, I'm safe? And then I will get at the end, especially if he’ll give me handouts and I'll get the real content at the end.” And I think that has just moved you right back up towards education as content, education as knowledge, not as development of skills, not as exploration of world-view.

PROFESSOR HESKETT: That can be very dangerous if it leads to behavior in the classroom in which students conclude that, since the instructor has the slide deck and I haven't prepared my slide deck, I really don’t have to prepare the slide deck because I can never measure up to what the instructor’s providing, and sooner or later before the end of the class, we’ll get the conclusions and we’ll get the right ones. That's a very dangerous word, “right,” isn't it?

Summarizing content at the end of class

PROFESSOR TOM DELONG: It’s the question that can’t always be answered in a simple way, other than when you’ve experienced it. So you might say, I hope some students don’t get the theory for a little while. Maybe they struggle with it just a little bit. The question is whether you feel a need to give them an answer at the end of each class. But that’s your issue. You're saying what’s best for the learning of the students. Part of it might be to create ambiguity. And I might say, “I'm going to teach three cases before I do a fifteen-minute little summary wrap-up.”