[Back to William Ross' Home Page]

        

 

Courses I Teach:

 

Undergraduate:

MGT 303: Principles of Labor-Management Relations

MGT 308:  Organizational Behavior

MGT 483:  Corporate Training - Link to Current Syllabus in MS-Word

MGT 485: Collective Bargaining

MGT 486: Human Resource Management: Current Topics and Policy Issues

 

 

Advice for Students Interested in Human Resources, Labor & Employment Relations, and Organizational Behavior

 

College of Business Undergraduate Student Learning Outcomes

 

Graduate:

MGT 738: Labor-Management Relations (MBA)

MGT 740: Current Topics in Human Resource Management and Labor & Employment Relations (MBA)

  

  

 

Student Evaluations  

A word about student evaluations: 

Student evaluations measure student impressions of the course, the instructor, and the various assignments within the course. Student evaluations reflect satisfaction with a course, how much people think they learned, etc.  While such information may be meaningful (particularly to the instructor who wants to improve), research suggests that people's impressions may only be modestly correlated with what people actually learned.  Even Jesus Christ -- the 'master teacher' -- did not place great faith in what the crowds said about him (John 2:24). Thus, to use Kirkpatrick's famous typology of training methods, student evaluations are a "reaction" measure and not always (or even necessarily) a "learning" measure.  Only a pretest and a posttest can really show how much was really learned during a course, and even that does not show how well people apply the knowledge outside of the classroom.  Evaluating student learning is much more complex than student evaluations can tell us.

Student evaluations have assumed an important role in modern academia.  Many universities place great weight on student evaluations when making promotion and tenure decisions.  [Of course, ideally, universities should also base such decisions on peer evaluations as well as student demonstrations of learning, critical thinking, problem solving, and the application of knowledge.]  Many students are also curious about whether a particular instructor or a course is "good" -- based on friends' and former students' impressions as well as formal student evaluation data (if available).  At many universities, student evaluation data are not public.  In the interest of providing such information, here is a summary of my student evaluation data for several years, rounded down to the nearest tenth of a point.  The scale goes from 1 to 5 with 5 being the "best".  What is provided is the fractional median for all items for the department's student evaluation measure (approximately 25 items).  Somewhere between 800 and 1000 students provided the data for this summary.  Most were undergraduates; approximately 10% were MBA students.

 

"All Items" Evaluation:

4.6 = average of twelve semesters' student evaluation from 2005 - 2010, rounded down to the nearest tenth of a point. 

 

Now you know.