Older Adjunct/Relating to Students

[the_geneticist]

Bad students get their fifteen minutes of fame on 'Rate My Professor.'

Which type of entry on 'Rate My Professors' will get higher enrollment so your course will run? Which type will get you the right students, because you already have plenty?

1. Professor Mahag is a strict grader but a very fair one. I learned more than I ever have in this school with their course. Students who come here to complain just didn't put in the work.
2. Professor Mahagonny is a blast! Funny, and I missed two quizzes and still got an A.
3. Always available for extra coaching. Generous with his time. Best prof I've had.
4. Doesn't do office hours, takes 24 hours to answer email when he answers at all.
5. Tries too hard to be cool.
6. Finally the department has hired a couple of hot professors. Luv ya, stud muffin!
7. Uses words I didn't know previously, writes the definition on the whiteboard. Vocabulary is a fun thing to delve into.
8. I cant understand this dude talking. DO NOT TAKE.
9. So tired of looking at those bow ties. How can this man exist?
10. What are office hours?

For RMP, only one thing truly matters. The "Easy A".

Why bother to look?  Your administration and scheduling folks won't.  If they want to know student views they'll look at your teaching evaluations.
Plus, it's like Yelp.  Only students who earned As or Fs will bother to comment.

[mahagonny]

Bad students get their fifteen minutes of fame on 'Rate My Professor.'

Which type of entry on 'Rate My Professors' will get higher enrollment so your course will run? Which type will get you the right students, because you already have plenty?

1. Professor Mahag is a strict grader but a very fair one. I learned more than I ever have in this school with their course. Students who come here to complain just didn't put in the work.
2. Professor Mahagonny is a blast! Funny, and I missed two quizzes and still got an A.
3. Always available for extra coaching. Generous with his time. Best prof I've had.
4. Doesn't do office hours, takes 24 hours to answer email when he answers at all.
5. Tries too hard to be cool.
6. Finally the department has hired a couple of hot professors. Luv ya, stud muffin!
7. Uses words I didn't know previously, writes the definition on the whiteboard. Vocabulary is a fun thing to delve into.
8. I cant understand this dude talking. DO NOT TAKE.
9. So tired of looking at those bow ties. How can this man exist?
10. What are office hours?

For RMP, only one thing truly matters. The "Easy A".

Why bother to look?  Your administration and scheduling folks won't.  If they want to know student views they'll look at your teaching evaluations.
Plus, it's like Yelp.  Only students who earned As or Fs will bother to comment.

A couple of reasons. You might look if you believed RMP is more reflective of how students talk to each other as opposed to how they talk to administrators on the faculty who solicit comments/ratings via teaching evaluations, comments that are not available to their friends (classmates). An administrator is not necessarily their confidante. The administrator can think you are a great teacher but it's your problem, not theirs, when your class doesn't make. Or more likely, the administrator doesn't give much a damn what you're doing unless someone walks into his office to complain about you or your eval's sink below the required numerical average, and neither does he worry that the best adjunct faculty are servicing the greater number of students if he doesn't want to promote notions of non-tenure track competence in the first place.
Also, students may see little point in putting any thought into teaching evaluations if they think tenure is the norm and that also means by their estimate, negative evaluations wouldn't have consequences.

This is why I let you know that I was primarily interested in hearing from people who currently live with the uncertainty of adjunct employment. These people tend to think of different aspects of the situation from what is commonly thought of by people who used to adjunct but are now guaranteed financial wealth for life through their academic position.

[Aster]

Bad students get their fifteen minutes of fame on 'Rate My Professor.'

Which type of entry on 'Rate My Professors' will get higher enrollment so your course will run? Which type will get you the right students, because you already have plenty?

1. Professor Mahag is a strict grader but a very fair one. I learned more than I ever have in this school with their course. Students who come here to complain just didn't put in the work.
2. Professor Mahagonny is a blast! Funny, and I missed two quizzes and still got an A.
3. Always available for extra coaching. Generous with his time. Best prof I've had.
4. Doesn't do office hours, takes 24 hours to answer email when he answers at all.
5. Tries too hard to be cool.
6. Finally the department has hired a couple of hot professors. Luv ya, stud muffin!
7. Uses words I didn't know previously, writes the definition on the whiteboard. Vocabulary is a fun thing to delve into.
8. I cant understand this dude talking. DO NOT TAKE.
9. So tired of looking at those bow ties. How can this man exist?
10. What are office hours?

For RMP, only one thing truly matters. The "Easy A".

Why bother to look?  Your administration and scheduling folks won't.  If they want to know student views they'll look at your teaching evaluations.
Plus, it's like Yelp.  Only students who earned As or Fs will bother to comment.

You probably work at an institution that doesn't scrape the bottom of the hiring barrel to staff the administrative positions. At Big Urban College, over half our administration were pulled from the bottom of the barrel (or sometimes under the barrel), which I can confirm because I'm often on those hiring committees. And yes, and I can also state with certainty that many of these people do visit RMP for purposes of "thoroughly evaluating" the faculty. They do that because these administrators are that unqualified to believe that RMP is a valid metric. And no, they don't understand how Yelp works either. I have to use small words and fast food analogies to sometimes communicate basic college operations principles to a few of my administrators. Too many of them picked up insta-leadership doctorates at the local for-profit university in order to meet the minimum hiring qualifications.

So yeah, if you're at a crap school, RMP unfortunately might be something that your employers monitor and may use against you if you aren't "popular enough". Occasionally the overuse of RMP gets so bad at Big Urban College, that I've found myself chastizing *tenure track professors* in the hallways for boasting about using it. I mean come on? Tenure-track professors using RMP? Unless they're an utter nincompoop or noob, they should know better than this.

[the_geneticist]

Bad students get their fifteen minutes of fame on 'Rate My Professor.'

Which type of entry on 'Rate My Professors' will get higher enrollment so your course will run? Which type will get you the right students, because you already have plenty?

1. Professor Mahag is a strict grader but a very fair one. I learned more than I ever have in this school with their course. Students who come here to complain just didn't put in the work.
2. Professor Mahagonny is a blast! Funny, and I missed two quizzes and still got an A.
3. Always available for extra coaching. Generous with his time. Best prof I've had.
4. Doesn't do office hours, takes 24 hours to answer email when he answers at all.
5. Tries too hard to be cool.
6. Finally the department has hired a couple of hot professors. Luv ya, stud muffin!
7. Uses words I didn't know previously, writes the definition on the whiteboard. Vocabulary is a fun thing to delve into.
8. I cant understand this dude talking. DO NOT TAKE.
9. So tired of looking at those bow ties. How can this man exist?
10. What are office hours?

For RMP, only one thing truly matters. The "Easy A".

Why bother to look?  Your administration and scheduling folks won't.  If they want to know student views they'll look at your teaching evaluations.
Plus, it's like Yelp.  Only students who earned As or Fs will bother to comment.

You probably work at an institution that doesn't scrape the bottom of the hiring barrel to staff the administrative positions. At Big Urban College, over half our administration were pulled from the bottom of the barrel (or sometimes under the barrel), which I can confirm because I'm often on those hiring committees. And yes, and I can also state with certainty that many of these people do visit RMP for purposes of "thoroughly evaluating" the faculty. They do that because these administrators are that unqualified to believe that RMP is a valid metric. And no, they don't understand how Yelp works either. I have to use small words and fast food analogies to sometimes communicate basic college operations principles to a few of my administrators. Too many of them picked up insta-leadership doctorates at the local for-profit university in order to meet the minimum hiring qualifications.

So yeah, if you're at a crap school, RMP unfortunately might be something that your employers monitor and may use against you if you aren't "popular enough". Occasionally the overuse of RMP gets so bad at Big Urban College, that I've found myself chastizing *tenure track professors* in the hallways for boasting about using it. I mean come on? Tenure-track professors using RMP? Unless they're an utter nincompoop or noob, they should know better than this.

Wow.  That is horrible!  RMP is even more biased and unreliable than the student evaluations.
Sorry, I had assumed that only students bothered to look at RMP. 

[mahagonny]

Bad students get their fifteen minutes of fame on 'Rate My Professor.'

Which type of entry on 'Rate My Professors' will get higher enrollment so your course will run? Which type will get you the right students, because you already have plenty?

1. Professor Mahag is a strict grader but a very fair one. I learned more than I ever have in this school with their course. Students who come here to complain just didn't put in the work.
2. Professor Mahagonny is a blast! Funny, and I missed two quizzes and still got an A.
3. Always available for extra coaching. Generous with his time. Best prof I've had.
4. Doesn't do office hours, takes 24 hours to answer email when he answers at all.
5. Tries too hard to be cool.
6. Finally the department has hired a couple of hot professors. Luv ya, stud muffin!
7. Uses words I didn't know previously, writes the definition on the whiteboard. Vocabulary is a fun thing to delve into.
8. I cant understand this dude talking. DO NOT TAKE.
9. So tired of looking at those bow ties. How can this man exist?
10. What are office hours?

For RMP, only one thing truly matters. The "Easy A".

Why bother to look?  Your administration and scheduling folks won't.  If they want to know student views they'll look at your teaching evaluations.
Plus, it's like Yelp.  Only students who earned As or Fs will bother to comment.

You probably work at an institution that doesn't scrape the bottom of the hiring barrel to staff the administrative positions. At Big Urban College, over half our administration were pulled from the bottom of the barrel (or sometimes under the barrel), which I can confirm because I'm often on those hiring committees. And yes, and I can also state with certainty that many of these people do visit RMP for purposes of "thoroughly evaluating" the faculty. They do that because these administrators are that unqualified to believe that RMP is a valid metric. And no, they don't understand how Yelp works either. I have to use small words and fast food analogies to sometimes communicate basic college operations principles to a few of my administrators. Too many of them picked up insta-leadership doctorates at the local for-profit university in order to meet the minimum hiring qualifications.

So yeah, if you're at a crap school, RMP unfortunately might be something that your employers monitor and may use against you if you aren't "popular enough". Occasionally the overuse of RMP gets so bad at Big Urban College, that I've found myself chastizing *tenure track professors* in the hallways for boasting about using it. I mean come on? Tenure-track professors using RMP? Unless they're an utter nincompoop or noob, they should know better than this.

Wow.  That is horrible!  RMP is even more biased and unreliable than the student evaluations.
Sorry, I had assumed that only students bothered to look at RMP.

I accept your apology for not knowing what you were posting about.