I got my grades today--no, not the grades that I gave out to my students, the grades they gave me on my teacher evaluations. They're good! They're great! They're my best ever! Almost uniformly 6.5 out of 7 across the board (with the exception of "uses blackboard effectively": 4.8). I must be doing something right.
Alas, however. One of the somethings that I am doing right is teaching a small class. What with administrative burdens--chair of the PEIS major, chair of the Economics graduate student admissions committee--overrunning my teaching points in past semesters (which gave me a sizable positive balance going into this year), and so on, I had the luxury of teaching only one course this spring. And it had only ten people in it.
This gave me unusually high teaching ratings for two reasons. First, I could work extra-hard at running it because it was the only course I taught. Second, small courses get better ratings. When I was Head Tutor of Harvard's undergraduate economics major, I once amused myself by regressing professor teaching ratings on (a) whether the course was required of majors or not, (b) a professorial fixed effect, and (c) the log of the size of the course. IIRC, log size had a coefficient of -0.56: double the size of the course, and you reduce the professor's rating by 0.4 points on the standard 1-7 scale. (No, I don't recall the professor fixed effects: I didn't keep a copy of them.) If that coefficient holds, then had I been teaching a 320-person course , then my teaching ratings would have been a very unimpressive 4.5.
But all this does not cloud my happiness today...
Posted by DeLong at June 11, 2002 06:36 PM