For decades, student ratings of university faculty have been used by administrators in high stakes faculty employment decisions such as tenure, promotion, contract renewal and reappointment, and merit pay. However, virtually no attention has been paid to the ethical questions of using ratings in employment decisions. Instead, the ratings literature is generally limited to psychometric issues such as whether a given student ratings instrument exhibits the statistical properties of reliability and validity. There is no consensus understanding of teaching effectiveness, the (...) very attribute that students are alleged to “evaluate.” What students are actually doing when they complete a ratings form—whether measuring, evaluating, reporting, judging, opining, etc.—remains unsettled in the ratings literature. If ratings are surveys of student satisfaction, they have no logical or ethical connection with teaching expertise. I argue that the administrative use of student ratings in faculty employment decisions violates basic moral principles including nonmaleficence, beneficence, professional autonomy and clinical independence, and multiple aspects of justice including due care, truthfulness, and equitable treatment. These ethical violations rule against any administrative use of student ratings in faculty employment decisions, including the “use with caution in conjunction with other evaluative methods” deployment of student ratings. My conclusion is that such use should be immediately and universally terminated. Formative use of student questionnaires as part of ordinary instructional communication and feedback between instructor and students is a separate issue and outside of the scope of this paper. (shrink)

Fair grading is modeled on two fundamental principles. The first principle is that grading should be impartial and consistent. The second principle is that a fair grade should be based on the student’s competence in the academic content of the course. I derive corollary principles of fair grading from these two basic principles and use them to evaluate common grading practices. I argue that exempting students from completing certain grade components is unfair, as is grading on attendance, class rank, deportment,tardiness, (...) effort, institutional values, moral virtues such as cheerfulness and helpfulness, and other non-course-content criteria. (shrink)

PARC is an "appended numeral" system of natural deduction that I learned as an undergraduate and have taught for many years. Despite its considerable pedagogical strengths, PARC appears to have never been published. The system features explicit "tracking" of premises and assumptions throughout a derivation, the collapsing of indirect proofs into conditional proofs, and a very simple set of quantificational rules without the long list of exceptions that bedevil students learning existential instantiation and universal generalization. The system can be used (...) with any Copi-style set of inference rules, so it is quite adaptable to many mainstream symbolic logic textbooks. Consequently, PARC may be especially attractive to logic teachers who find Jaskowski/Gentzen-style introduction/elimination rules to be far less "natural" than Copi-style rules. The PARC system is also keyboard-friendly in comparison to the widely adopted Jaskowski-style graphical subproof system of natural deduction, viz., Fitch diagrams and Copi "bent arrow" diagrams. (shrink)

A book combining theories and practice of ethics in the practice of criminal justice.