Physicist Amok

evolgen has a post on TA evaluations (and a great link to Rate Your Students!). Namely, the harsh ones he just received. Such as "Honestly sucks. Thinks he knows a lot but really doesn’t."

For an intro course, this means you’re doing your job. In my last year of undergrad, I was TA for intro physics for the honors engineering students. Their sense of entitlement was enormous. And then they got me. I made them start from Newton’s laws or conservation laws on their homework. I made them explain, using words, what it was they were calculating and how they came by their formulas. No references to the book were allowed. I corrected their English. By the end of the course, they were turning in decent homeworks, and they could carry through reasonably simple arguments starting from first principles. I was well satisfied with their progress.

And then I got the evaluations. I was mean. I was arrogant. I was chauvinistic, and I favored girls, and both those comments were from male students (I was given the original sheets, and I knew everyone’s handwriting). I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did. I made them do unnecessary things like derive from first principles and wouldn’t let them quote equations from their textbook.

But here’s the interesting thing. The good students, starting from about mid-B, didn’t write comments, or if they did it was along the lines of “It’s been fun! Thanks!” (in blue pen from a girl who struggled mightily but came out quite well).

Also amusing: the students from the big science and math high schools had larger egos than the other students, but their performance wasn’t noticeably different.