Viewpoints
Procedures need revising for graduate student instructor awards

This is the problem: Identify from hundreds of graduate student instructors the very best. Current procedures require a nomination package consisting of a vita of the candidate, a two-page personal statement by the candidate, letters from the chair, the dean, and the course coordinator; up to three letters from students, from peer instructors, and from faculty; and course data (enrollment, grading, evaluations, level, materials, delivery methods). For good measure: eightfold.

This dossier is transmitted via the dean to the Graduate School. A committee will judge the 40 or so dossiers, and pronounce a 1-1/2 handful of winners. The winners are feted in a gentle ceremony with agreeable speeches and tea and petit fours.

I submit:

It is unwise to get the candidates involved, for it creates many losers for a few winners, and even the losers are glorious contributors.

Writing letters of recommendation is an art in itself, and the danger lurks that one ends up honoring the best dossier rather than the best instructor.

The committee to select the final winners is asked to compare classroom instruction in English (20 students?) with laboratory experiments in chemistry (50 students?) with recitation drills in accounting (80 students?) and so on: on its face, quite impossible.

Contrast with this the following procedure: The Graduate School invites each decanal area to recommend at most one for each 20 eligible instructors. The dean asks the chairs for recommendations. In a chairs' meeting, agreement is reached on one or a few truly deserving candidates, (or, absent agreement between the chairs, the dean makes a final ruling.) The winner is (winners are) submitted to the Graduate School, which orchestrates the ceremony where they will be recognized and receive an award.

In this scenario the instructors themselves are not in the loop: The winners will be happily surprised, but there will be no "losers" (who went to great effort for a futile cause). The persons with the relevant information, personally acquainted with the candidate and possessing a track record of knowledge which invites comparisons, make the informed choices, and bounce them off equally respected and informed colleagues and the dean. There are no octets of fat dossiers, no letters to ask others to write and to be written, and there is no committee to make impossible comparative decisions.

As intimated above, it is cheaper, simpler, fairer.

John C.G. Boot
Department chair and professor, Management Science and Systems