Professors who become popular with the students find their sections perennially full, which increases their grading load. Professors whom students avoid like a bad smell wind up with fewer students, and therefore lighter grading loads, for the same salary.Institutional arrangements such as union contracts and tenure, which are not without equivalents elsewhere in civil service and the private sector, inhibit his ability to reward the productive and sanction the shirking.
From an administrative point of view, the popularity penalty is hard to address. I like to hear that students like their classes, and the soulless bean-counter in me can do the math well enough to realize that the books balance better when the classes are full. That said, there's something perverse about the better teachers having to do more work for free, and the dregs getting a free ride.It's difficult to design an incentive-compatible pay-for-performance algorithm. One could use the eight-week enrollment counts as one dimension of merit money, but then there's the temptation to be undemanding in the first eight weeks. Or one could use consistent low enrollments relative to other sections as evidence of ineffective teaching, but that's going to be harder to implement the more esoteric the section offerings are.
The Quote, however, is in the comments.
I am pissed off in practice I feel like I'm being punished for being good at what I do. No, it's not my job to worry about what's happening with Prof. X, and I try not to do so, but after a while, it begins to feel like one is being used, and that makes it really hard to be an effective teacher.Immediately below is a response that captures the dilemma.
The catch, of course, is that it can be difficult to differentiate between the instructors who are popular because they're good, and those who are popular because they're ridiculously easy.There might be ways of identifying Mickey's producers, but those would require somebody to do hard analysis of messy facts.
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