Teachers' performance
Prof. Bais's appreciation for the introduction of teaching evaluation at JNU (published in Daily Star 18 July) is well placed. However, if I were him, I would brace myself for a few surprises and probably start thinking of ways to deal with them in advance; hence the reason for writing here.
In our youth when we were public university students, in addition to spending our time with studies, we had to conjure up quite a lot of efforts in trying to please our instructors. Grades did not come from work alone but from being able to apple polish some of the senior teachers; a few even required their praise to be sung and special services be offered at home. Matters at times went so far down as to withdrawal of published grades only to be revised again so that the teacher's pets were aptly rewarded. Even combined student protests at times could not get these usurpers off the campus, let alone their self-esteem urging them to step down they appeared to be omnipotent if not utterly shameless. It has been quite sometime we have left the scene of these unaccounted for abuses and looking back at those times, I do realize that if a system like teaching evaluation were installed in place, perhaps matters wouldn't go down thus far. However, while studying/teaching abroad and teaching at home, I have marked a clear difference in student culture and its impact on teaching and learning. Here I would make a generalization: I have seen students abroad come to universities out of a sincere desire to learn. In a majority of cases only the financially capable or those driven by an urge to improve upon their lives by educating themselves join universities. A large number of students work part-time and finance their own education. In contrast, as I can say for private universities, a majority of the students in Bangladesh are “sent” to universities by their parents who see the need for a degree certificate essential for a well-paid job. Note that it's not the student but parents who are motivated more. Therefore these students who have everything taken care of by their parents, show only half the motivation to educate themselves and hardly come anywhere close to making an effort at par with those who have to earn it the hard way. Soon this is reflected in the grade sheets, pressure from parents begins to build up and students start blaming their teachers. An instructor who grades liberally soon becomes the sought after one and the one scrutinizing strictly start losing students. Teaching evaluations soon turn out to be rewards from students for giving good grades the ones they can show to their parents at home. One would like to think that when the number of students is large the mean value or consensus would be more representative of true teaching standards. Unfortunately, I have seen a whole batch of students team up to mark a teaching evaluation poor just to “teach the instructor a lesson” for being strict. In many cases, students who received poor grades from an instructor earlier routinely evaluated him as bad for subsequent courses. Having said that, this of course, does not mean that I intend to write off teaching evaluation as a failing system, but I want to stress that student attitude and education culture in Bangladesh is different from Western societies after which our education system (and teaching evaluation) is modelled.
We must take into account that adjustments need to be made so that wilful manipulation can be prevented to reflect a teacher's true performance.
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