Academic

What Students Want

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

Another professor recently told me that education is the only product that consumers want less than they paid for. Maybe that is true of some students, but I suspect the reason professors sometimes feel like that is because we misinterpret what some students are paying for. Many students value their legal education, but a significant minority seem to value only their diploma. For these students, keeping class simple -- one three-hour, crammable exam at the end of the semester -- is optimal.

By contrast, my class (here, here, here, here, for example) is a nightmare. When I first looked at the enrollment in my Business Associations course in August, I had 91 students. Within a few days after I sent my syllabus to the students, that number dropped to about 80. Today, we stand at 69.

What's the problem? Am a suddenly a horrible teacher? Maybe. But I have spoken to a number of the students who remain in the class, and they are uniformly enthusiastic. After the last class, one student wrote to me via email: "I now feel like if I learn remember nothing else from this semester, I will remember the material on partnership formation forever."

Another: "The exercise was actually very enjoyable and informative for me. I only hope the class got as much out of it as I did."

And another: "I really think that [the activities in class] are really helpful to the students because they enable the class to analyze and implement in simulated situations the principles learned in the reading assignments. For instance, today I got a better grasp on the importance of establishing a [business association] as soon there is the agreement. This helps to avoid confusion on the role played in the partnership by each participant."

And these are just the emails. At least a dozen students have told me orally during the past week that they feel engaged in the class and are very much looking forward to the remainder of the semester. Moreover, the students in my Quality Circle have offered extensive feedback, already helping me to work out many kinks, but the main thrust of their feedback is that the class is headed in the right direction, that this class seems much more useful to them than most of their traditional classes.

So what about those drops? When I inquired with other students, this is what I heard:

• Many students don't like teams from bad experiences as undergraduates. One student felt that this would account for most of the drops, at least the early ones.
• The present and prepared system (described in my syllabus) allows students to miss only a week and a half of classes before their grades are negatively affected. Some students feel the need to miss more than that to secure a summer job. I am sympathetic to this concern, and I actually changed the policy one week into the class to accommodate conflicts with on-campus interviews. In the end, however, I decided that this class would not function for the students who missed big chunks of the semester (one student told me that a student last year missed 32 days during the semester looking for a job!!!), so I held the line on excusing all recruitment-related absences. And I know that some students dropped for this reason.
• Some students told me that my class was just too much work. By establishing incentives to be prepared for every class period, giving mid-term evaluations, and assigning team projects, I was increasing the workload beyond what they were willing to bear.
• My favorite: this semester is my first time teaching this course at BYU, and I am using a new edition of my casebook ... which means that there are no canned outlines floating around the law school. The other section of this course, which will be taught next semester, has lots of outlines in circulation. Wow.

So what lessons should I take away from this? I used to see the high enrollments in my classes as a badge of honor (I'm popular! I'm a good teacher!), but this experience has made me reconsider that position. I am a relatively strict grader, so I have always known that students were not taking my classes because the classes were easy A's, but it never occurred to me that they were taking my classes because there were available outlines and I didn't demand too much of their brains until the few days before the final exam. I am not suggesting that high enrollments are a counter-indicator of teaching quality, but rather that enrollments may be skewed by the presence of students who are looking for a combination of entertainment value and limited demands on their time and energy, rather than a high-quality learning experience.

Full post as published by Conglomerate on September 05, 2008 (boomark / email).