I Want to Give Thanks For
Boalt's grading system (3L).
What or who do you want to thank? Please include your year in school.
What or who do you want to thank? Please include your year in school.
Labels: 0L/1L Advice, Grades And Other Neurotic Bullshit, Rabid Conservatives
posted by Armen Adzhemyan at 12:29 PM
27 Comments:
3L here. I am thankful that classes I sub-P still count towards the 85 units I need for graduation.
I am thankful for a few wonderful professors at Boalt, who've inspired my deep interest in areas of the law that I never would have imagined would be at all interesting (3L).
I'm thankful I have a job after graduation. I wasn't expecting it to be lined up yet. (3L)
I'm thankful that Boalt admitted me in spite of my ridiculously poor undergraduate record thus allowing me to put the ignominy behind. (class of 2006)
Yes, I'm thankful for P=JD. 3L here. Totally checked out. It's time to have fun while we can before the whip of The Man is upon us.
I am very thankful for my classmates. Law school can really suck sometimes, but it sucks a little less when you like the people (1L).
P = JD, job after graduation, locker to stuff my things in before football games--thanks Boalt!! (3L)
classmates, professors, grading summer associate position, and most of all - girl on my journal who I have a crush on!
morning sickness. ugh.
I'm thankful for electronic teacher evaluations.
But am I? Could the Boalt admin please state whether our anonymity is protected in the evaluation system? I don't think it is. At least when we submitted the evals by pen and paper, I knew the teacher had no reliable, sure-fire way of determining who I was. After all, a sizeable number of us no longer hand-write exams, so there's no reason for the teacher to know our handwriting when they read our evals after finals. With the new system, the Boalt admin could easily connect the evaluations back to students through our student ID's (remember that you type in your student ID before you fill out the evals). I suppose it's unlikely that the admin would crack our anonymity on the evaluations, but, in this day and age, I'm not that trustful. I'm not going to fill out an electronic evaluation with my SID number and blindly trust Boalt.
I also find it thoughtless that the admin (or the professors) haven't even bothered to explain how anonymous (or not anonymous) the new teaching evaluation system is. If they do spell it out, I won't trust them if all they say is "it's anonymous." They should admit, in reasonable detail, who has access to what information at every step of the process. Can the professors trace back the evaluations to student ID's or students? I would assume that the professors don't access the database of comments, but just get printouts. If they get printouts, do those printouts have our id numbers or names? I would assume not, but, again, no one has clarified. Can the Deans access the identities of the evaluators? Probably, if they asked the web czar. Also, with the new system, if I were an administrator, I'd find it interesting to correlate teaching evaluations with grades that students received in the class. Since both our exams which we upload and the teaching evaluation forms that we fill out are keyed to our SID's, I'd think such a spreadsheet is quite doable. Is that what the admin is doing with the evaluations?
Anyway, Armen, you may want to do Boalt a favor and do a post reminding students to fill out their teaching evaluations. In the post, if you are so inclined, you can remark that commenters (or at least this one) have flagged the following issues and ask that the admin issue a response:
1) How anonymous are our teacher evaluations, now that we enter our student identitication numbers before filling out the forms? Who, among the Boalt admin, deans, and professors, has the capacity to determine which students wrote which comments? Could the school clearly state the information privacy ramifications of the evaluations? Remember that, while some of us may not have filled out the evaluations out of laziness or apathy, others were distrustful of the non-anonymous interface. Boalt, a "transparent institution," should clarify.
2) Will the school post the comments for each class publicly at some point in the future? At other schools, students have access to the comments that students who have taken a class have written. The numerical ratings that that we have access to when we decide whether to take a class give us very limited information.
If Boalt is so committed to students' filling out the electronic forms, they should have the courtesty of specifying in reasonable detail their information privacy policy with respect to the evaluations (given that Boalt now has more identifying information than ever before [our SID's] in our evaluations). Also, Boalt's admin should consider enticing students to fill the evals with thoughtful comments by agreeing to post some or all of the written comments for future students to read.
Huh? Are you one of those crazy Diebold rules the world conspiracy theorists that Lou Dobbs has? And what does that comment have to do with giving thanks? It's the exact opposite. I will return the favor by doing exactly the opposite of what you ask...I will not write to tell people not to fill out their evals.
I am thankful for the diatribe about the evaluations. How stupid and cheap can the administration be? I will again reward their stupidity and cheapness by not filling out my evaluations. If the professors care so much about them, perhaps they will force the administration to go back to the old paper evaluations. This is unlikely, of course, because most of the faculty don't really care about the evaluations. Most just care about their big salaries.
Armen, the weekend is over and we're done being thankful. We're back to being self-interested, self-centered, self-reverential law students.
At to the evaluation issues:
1) Interesting from an ACLU sort of perspective, but the entire exercise presupposes profs give a shit about their evaulations. They don't. We don't. So I don't.
2) As the commenter alludes, the numerical system is basically worthless. Actually posting qualitative comments would be nice, but it would alsotax the considerably limited copy-and-paste abilities of our administrators, so I wouldn't count on it.
At my undergrad institution, we didn't truth the admin either, so the student government took charge and produced an annual course guide that basically had nothing more than student comments -- it was helpful though. Seems like a perfect project for our BHSA.
Come to think of it, I haven't seen any kegs in the courtyard lately, so what the hell else are they doing with their time? Paging Dr. Chavez...
Correlating evaluation scores with final grades won't be that helpful in the pursuit of a conspiracy because it is entirely reasonable that students who liked the professor/class would pay more attention and study more, which in theory should result in higher grades.
I gave a prof bad marks on an online evaluation and still received an Am Jur in the class.
So much for your conspiracy theory.
And, in keeping with the topic, I was quite thankful that my grade was independent on my evaluation!
Speaking of conspiracies, does the admissions office ever release our LSATs and undergrad GPAs so they can be compared to our grades? I assume they don't because they never asked for our permission but you never know.
Boalt does not release information about its students unless that information has (1) been disclosed in a resume and the employer is attempting to verify or (2) it is in a transcript the student requested.
Someone correct me if i'm wrong, but that is what the website said about it.
McWho,
I think you missed the point. The concern is whether the admissions office ever releases our LSATs and undergrad GPAs to either the registrar, the dean of students or the dean so that they can compare grades in law school to admissions stats. They have never asked us to do it but I'm not sure they have to since it is all internal to Boalt.
Why does it matter? People might want to think their LSAT stops mattering once they get accepted to Boalt. People with low LSATs might also not want to be put in a position where their performance is being tracked and may have an impact on whether future students with similiar LSATs get admitted to Boalt. Let's hope the administration is not doing this because 1Ls have enough stress without having to worry about their grades impacting people besides themselves. I suspect 2Ls and 3Ls don't have the energy to care anymore.
Wow! I can't believe anybody is seriously worried about the LSAT and the school tracking you. Don't you 1Ls have civil procedure questions and outlining to worry about?
On the other hand, I think it is a legitimate thing to track how LSATs (in aggregate) correlate to grades especially given Boalt's involvement in the alternative LSAT. Given our grading system, any such analysis would probably not be very effective because there is not enough differentiation within our grades.
Anonymous @ 8:30, you may think it would be legitimate but not effective but I think it may be effective but not legitimate. I do not want my grades affecting anyone's future but mine!
Well if it helps, I've been consistently shooting down the LSAT grade correlation semester-after-semester with crappy grades at Boalt despite a near perfect LSAT score. :p
I'm like the poster child for Prof. Schultz's LSAT alternative.
But I still got a job!
I think whoever the 1L is who is worried about the LSAT tracking thing is possibly trying to procrastinate studying for civ pro, much like I am.
And 10:32, that makes me feel better, because my LSAT was probably somewhere in the middle of other students here, so maybe I will get good grades?? With quality logic like that, how can I not? I mean, really.
Mostly I hope I get a job.
I like you, 10:32, cause I'm the guy with the shitty LSAT (25th percentile) but mostly HHs. ;) So I've got a more personal grudge with that damn test. It tied to knock me out but..."can't nobody hooooold me downnnnnnnn...."
I know I'm a few days late, but I'm just thankful to be here. Some (a "vocal" minority) don't realize how fortunate you all are, as illustrated by your moaning and bitching in these comments. (2L Transfer)
I want to offer my final thought on the evals since at least one boalt prof is concerned that the comments here may deter people from filling them out.
People should fill out the evals if they have something to say. You're just as free not to fill them out. But if a prof is taking time out of class to give you a chance to do it, then it's courteous to do so. That is all. All the conspiracy theories are really laughable.
The Boalt evals are mostly useless to students, but there are 2 times I fill them out:
1. When the prof was terrible. Make a record. It doesn't do much, but it's a start. Especially if you aren't going to do anything non-anonymous.
2. When the prof cares and actually wants feedback, I try to give real comments.
Armen, why are the "conspiracy" theories laughable? It seems pretty evident that if the school WANTS to see who wrote an evaluation, they are capable of doing so. That's the nature of the internet.
I had a professor who was so awful that I wanted to write some pretty bad stuff about them (not vulgar, just brutally honest). But I self-censored myself, because I thought that the admin might get curious about the person who wrote such biting comments. So I toned my eval down.
Also, re: LSAT and GPA - I'm another person who falls into the "scored in Boalt's bottom 25th percentile LSAT range but has kicked ass grade wise" category. So for those of you who came here feeling inferior because you bombed the LSAT or didn't graduate from Princeton or Harvard, don't stress. And while I work pretty hard, I'm by no means a recluse.
This reminds me: I'm thankful for the admissions office at Boalt, who admitted me despite my numbers not quite adding up.
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