News & Views item - January  2005

 

 

Who and How to Grade the Teacher. (January 25, 2005)

    Matthew Thompson in today's Sydney Morning Herald brings up the matter of the federal government allocating in the coming financial year $54.6 million for a "Learning and Teaching Performance Fund" to be dispensed to tertiary institutions demonstrating high student satisfaction and low drop-out rates. The fund is to rise to $83.5 million in 2007 and $113.8 million in 2008.

 

At just over a quarter of a billion dollars over three years, that, by Australian standards, is a juicy package of bucks. The question is will it, or indeed can it, be spent wisely.

 

So for example, Griffith University's Gavin Moodie asks, "Do institutions with lower cut-off scores [for entry], mark easier than other institutions - who would bloody know?" And went on to tell Thompson: Relying on student satisfaction levels might also fail to take into account the inevitably lower degree of individual attention an undergraduate receives in the crowded lecture halls of popular courses, such as first year psychology, compared to niche courses "like Swedish".

 

And Thompson also reports:

The Commonwealth is still working through the methods to be used to allocate the funds, with the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (AVCC) arguing that any measures should recognise the diverse circumstances of Australia's 38 public institutions rather than relying on a simplistic ranking system. Nevertheless, in its submission to the Government, the committee says that the fund is "an important step forward in recognising the central importance of learning and teaching to each Australian university".

Holding up "low drop out rates" as a criterion for grading teaching would seem to be a very dubious measure. Gabor Szego was head of mathematics at Stanford University, a brilliant researcher and among other courses taught Orthogonal Polynomials to advanced under graduates. For those students who would go on to make significant contributions to mathematics he was a inspiring teacher, to those rather more pedestrian he bordered on the incomprehensible and the student attrition rate was, well, significant.

 

HJ Muller, the Nobelist in Medicine or Physiology who discovered the mutagenesis of X-radiation, when at Indiana University gave lectures in introductory genetics for a number of years to first year biology students who found him incomprehensible; well most of them did, a few got inspired and went on to graduate and postgraduate studies in genetics. And in the more advanced courses again, as in the case of Szego, good students appreciated him, and to them, being taught by a Nobel Laureate was "a big deal";  mediocre ones considered him an abominable teacher.

 

Are we really seeing a $250 million dollar public relations gimmick by Dr Nelson with the purpose of showing us how HE is bringing the universities to heel? Perish the thought.