Workplace Blog

The Chronicle: Harvard Study Finds That Students at Private High Schools Have a Clear Edge

Researchers at Harvard University say private high schools give their students an advantage over those who attend public schools. The new findings, presented in a report released today, challenge a recent study by the U.S. Department of Education, which did not find as many statistically significant differences between the effect of private and public schools on student achievement.

The Harvard study found a private-school advantage in 11 of 12 comparisons of students at public and private high schools. In eighth-grade mathematics, for instance, the new study found a private-school advantage of three to seven points on test scores; in reading, the advantage ranged from nine to 13 points.

The Sacramento Bee: Web site reveals professors’ grading

Web sites that allow college students to anonymously evaluate their professors — slamming them as buffoons or rating them as ”hot” — have grown in popularity in recent years.

Now, a unique site called PickProf, which also posts the numbers of A’s through F’s given out in individual classes, is breaking into the California market of more than 2.3 million public university and college students.

The for-profit company prevailed recently in a public-records lawsuit against the University of California-Davis that was seen as a test case in California. (The school initially refused to hand over the letter-grade information, then backed down and paid PickProf $15,000 in legal fees.)

Now the company is seeking the distribution of grades at other University of California schools, the California State University system and the state’s community colleges — to the ire of faculty members who say students will shop for easy classes.

The Daily Bruin: Class ratings may go public

The results of the university-distributed professor evaluations could potentially be made available to students within the upcoming academic year.

The numerical data from the end-of-quarter professor evaluations are at the center of a proposal currently in the works by Marwa Kaisey, president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council.

According to the Daily Bruin archives, professor evaluations were available in booklets published by the Office of Instructional Development until 1995. The booklets were discontinued because of high printing costs.

Inside Higher Ed: Mobilizing the Campus Right

We shouldn’t have to have this conference,” Roger Custer, director of the National Conservative Student Conference, said in an interview Monday after delivering the meeting’s opening address. “But these students are so isolated on campus.”

In its 28th year, the Young America’s Foundation annual college student gathering is a well-established Washington tradition — with roughly 400 attendees and a speaker list including Newt Gingrich, Robert Novak and David Brooks. Still, speakers talk with a marked sense of urgency.

There is little tolerance for the conservative viewpoint on campus, panelist after panelist agreed. The charge of a liberal slant in academe is nothing new, but the assertion found new life in each speech. The sense of victimization shone through in the organizers’ description of the conference as a place for students to “learn about conservative ideas and how to advance them in the face of liberal hostility.”