The Philosophers' Cocoon

What's Wrong With Rankings? 2: Some Decisions Should Be Hard

By Sam Duncan

As I said in my last post I think the APDA is a much better place for those considering graduate school in philosophy to start than is the PGR, but I think using the APDA as a ranking would be a bad idea and I hope Jennings and others involved will never try to make it into one. Now I won’t deny that I think the PGR is especially problematic for a number of reasons, but I have larger issues with all rankings.  Relying on a ranking as a ranking to make a choice like where to go to graduate school is a very bad idea. To paraphrase Kierkegaard here rankings try to make what should be a difficult decision too easy.

To see why let me start with a ranking I cooked up by pulling from the most recent APDA’s ten year placement rates:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (84%)

2.  Yale University (77%)

3. Baylor University (71%)

4-5. University of Tennessee/Pennsylvania State University (tied 67%)

6. Vanderbilt University (65%)

7. Rutgers (64%)

8. University of Virginia (63%)

9. University of Hawai’i at Manoa (58%)

10. UCLA (55%)

11. Villanova University (52%)

12-14. University of Chicago/University of Miami/University of Memphis (tied 50%)

15. Duke University (45%)

16. The University of Utah (42%)

No doubt you’ll notice there are a lot of things wrong with it (which is the point). For one the small differences in the placement rates between Rutgers, Tennessee, Penn State, Vanderbilt, and UVA are almost certainly statistical noise as is the similarly tiny difference between Villanova and the University of Chicago, the University of Memphis and the University of Miami.

More importantly, there is of course a huge difference between the kinds of jobs these programs place their students in. Tennessee, Rutgers, and UVA grads all have relatively good job prospects (though keep in mind relatively good is only a bit better than a coin flip) but the graduates who get jobs are going to get different kinds of jobs. To my knowledge UVA hasn’t placed a graduate in a research focused job straight out of the PhD program in the last ten years nor has Tennessee. Many Rutgers graduates who get jobs will get research focused jobs though. Or compare UVA and the University of Tennessee with UCLA and the University of Chicago. The evidence we have suggests that a graduate of the former programs has a statistically significantly better shot at permanent academic placement than does one from the latter. But University of Chicago and UCLA graduates are competitive for research focused jobs while UVA and University of Tennessee graduates usually aren’t.

If all you care about is getting an academic job at all then UVA and Tennessee win. If you only care about a job at a research focused school then UVA and Tennessee are out while UChicago and UCLA are decent enough options. However, what if you prefer a job at a research focused school if you can find it, but think you could be happy at a teaching focused school? Are the somewhat better chances of getting an academic job coming out of the University of Tennessee or UVA enough to outweigh the fact you’d be more or less giving up on a research focused job? The answer to that question is going to vary enormously from person to person. I also suspect that many potential graduate students may underestimate how happy they would be with a teaching focused job and instead defer to an unstated and undefended prejudice that such jobs are not good ones. I say this from personal experience as I wouldn’t have thought I’d like teaching at a community college when I was applying to graduate schools, but I’m honestly quite happy with it.

Or consider Baylor. It has an awesome placement record, but it also has a religious identity that it takes quite seriously. Among other things that has a big impact on the jobs graduates of its program get, which are often at schools that have not just religious identities but theologically and politically conservative ones. A lot of potential graduate students would not be happy with a job at Hillsdale College or Grove City College, then again there are people for whom either might be a good fit.

And what are you interested in and how strongly? Are you really wedded to one area of philosophy and wouldn’t be satisfied researching or teaching anything else? Are you particularly interested in one area but think it likely your interests will change? Do you just like philosophy and haven’t picked an area to focus on?

How you answer these questions will also affect your own personal rankings. If you are in the not sure category, then it makes sense to pick a bigger department where faculty have more diverse interests. Despite its incredible placement record even MIT might not be the best fit for you and you might want to look at somewhere where faculty are more eclectic in their interests. Or suppose you want to work in Chinese philosophy and wouldn’t be satisfied with anything else, then Hawai’i, Utah, and Duke may be the only entries here you should even think about. But what if American Pragmatism is your favorite thing in philosophy but can imagine you’d be happy working on and teaching something else? Should you go to Miami where you could work on that or to say a program with better placement but with no faculty working in pragmatism? I have no idea, but I do know that simply looking at where all your prospects were on my little list or any other like it would be a terrible way to make this decision.

On top of that there are a host of other factors to consider. For one thing, what are your career prospects if you don’t get an academic job? That should count for something but how do you weigh it assuming you even have the data? And good luck getting that data. Of the schools I’ve glanced at only Rutgers seems to be doing a good job listing non-academic placements. It's probably no coincidence that they also seem to be doing a good job placing students in good jobs outside academia.

There are important things to consider besides career prospects. No matter whether you get a job or not and no matter where you get a job if you do, the PhD program itself is going to take up a decent chunk of your life. Probably 4 years at minimum and quite probably more like 7. The quality of those years matters. What is the environment of the PhD program like? If you don’t get a job will you still look back on it fondly as a good experience? Where is the school located and how well will living there suit you? Here too there is no one size fits all answer. If you prefer living in a major metropolitan area and like being able to walk to things, Knoxville is not going to fit you. On the other hand if you loathe winter and like hiking in the mountains it beats Chicago, Boston, or the Philadelphia suburbs hands down.

Deciding whether to go to graduate school and where to go should both be difficult decisions that require one to think a lot about what one really wants and values. If you do it right, there is no one size fits all answer to this question nor any ranking that can tell you what you should do. You have to decide what matters to you. If you rely on rankings, whether mine, the PGR’s or another you are letting someone else make that decision for you. That might be a good enough way to decide what ink pen or coffee maker to buy. It’s not a good way to make a decision about what you want to do with your life. I’ll stop here for now, but in my next post I’ll have more to say about the value judgments that inevitably sneak into rankings

7 Years Later Excerpt #7: Preparing Your CV for the Job Market

By Trevor Hedberg

For many of us, summer is wrapping up, and for those nearing the end of graduate school, that means job market preparations are right around the corner (or perhaps have already begun). Since another job market season is not too far away, I think it is appropriate to share a few excerpts from 7 Years Later that focus specifically on aspects of the job market. This one covers how an ABD graduate student should approach editing and refining their CV in preparation for their first run on the job market.

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Hopefully, as you have inched closer to the job market, you have been periodically updating your CV. It will almost surely be one of the first items read by committee members, and it is one of the most important. Your biggest accomplishments should be clearly visible on the first page, and the document as a whole should be organized using a clear and consistent scheme. If you are including a brief dissertation summary on your first page, make sure it is succinct enough not to make your other accomplishments less noticeable, particularly if you have a strong publication record. If you’re looking for a way to model a good CV, browse some well-known philosophers online and find a CV format that presents the material clearly and professionally.[1] Then mimic that style. Don’t be tempted to use any odd fonts or avant-garde formatting: they might make your material more noticeable, but you want your application to stand out because of its impressive content – not because its bizarre appearance.

Before we go further, here is one obvious but important rule to remember when preparing all of your materials:

Honesty Rule: Do not intentionally present false or misleading information on any of your application materials.

There are two reasons for abiding by this rule. First, there are moral considerations. It is generally wrong to engage in acts of deception, and absent the outlandish thought experiments of philosophers with too much time on their hands, there will rarely be anything special about applying for a job that would warrant an exception to this general moral rule. Second, there are practical considerations. These acts of deception are likely to be detected – either upon initial review or later in the process – and getting caught trying to deceive the committee is a surefire way to sink your chances for that particular job. Furthermore, since the philosophical world is small and people talk, there is a decent chance that being caught in this lie will follow you to other job applications. Here are a few deceptive practices on CVs that should be avoided:

• Do not list AOSs and AOCs that you genuinely do not have.
• Do not list papers under review as publications. They are not publications. Only papers that have been accepted for publication should be listed as publications.
• Do not lie about the projected date of your dissertation defense. (Your dissertation advisor is the one who should speak about the projected defense date anyway; they should mention it in their letter of recommendation.)
• Do not list all your publications in one section and title it “Selected Publications.” This creates the impression that you have more publications than you actually do.
• Do not present campus talks (e.g., a presentation delivered to the undergraduate philosophy club at your institution) as if they were equivalent to presentations at professional conferences or invited talks at other universities.[2]

Beyond these rules about avoiding deception, there are two other important things to keep in mind about the content of your CV. First, do not list anything from prior to graduate school except for information about your undergraduate degree and where you received it. This material will look like CV padding and is mostly irrelevant to your professional credentials now. The lone exception might be a truly distinguished undergraduate award (e.g., Rhodes scholar) that would be impressive even though it was achieved at the undergraduate level.

Second, your CV should be constructed so that every major strength of your professional profile appear within the first two pages. Your CV may well be much longer, but whatever your selling points are, they need to be front and center on the first two pages. If a committee member is not impressed on the first or second page, it is doubtful they will read further: there will be hundreds of job applicants for their vacant position, and very little time will be spent reviewing the fine-grained details of your materials at the initial review stage.

Placing your greatest strengths early in your CV could require reorganizing your credentials from how they would normally be formatted. The standard order puts your education, areas of specialization and competence, and employment history first (though you may not have any employment history beyond your GTA experience). After these items, publications and other research-related material typically follows. But if you have a ton of solo teaching experience and are targeting teaching-focused jobs, make sure your courses taught are prominently featured and cleanly presented within the first two pages. Do not bury that information near the end of your CV where it may never be read. To offer a different example, when I was preparing for the job market, I opted to push my dissertation abstract to the very back of my dissertation so I could list all my publications on the first page of my CV. No matter how concise I made the summary, it still pushed a few of my publications onto page 2. My publications were my strongest selling point, so I wanted them all on the first page.

Regardless of your formatting scheme, some items should virtually always be near the back of your CV. Your graduate coursework, reference information, and university service should not be in the first two pages. Even if your service work is impressive (e.g., president of graduate student senate), these details can be mentioned in your cover letter if you think they are worth highlighting. Typically, they will not be noteworthy enough to leave a big impression on search committees.

Now what if you do not have 2 pages of content without including graduate coursework, service, etc.? Unless you are using ludicrously small font, that is a very bad sign. Just your AOS, AOCs, educational information, and contact information will take up almost half of the first page. Surely, during 5+ years of graduate studies, you have some conference presentations, publications, awards, notable teaching experience, etc., that can fill up an additional page and a half. If you do not, then you probably did not do enough during graduate school to prepare yourself for the job market.[3]

 

[1] If you want a more elaborate list of a CV’s typical content and organization, see this post by Lewis Powell. Note, however (as Powell does), that in many respects there are no agreed-upon rules regarding how CVs are formatted and organized. A large aspect of that will be left to your discretion.

[2] Note that there is some disagreement about whether “job talks” – presentations delivered to a department who is considering whether or not to hire you – should be listed on a CV. See this post on the Philosophers’ Cocoon for some discussion of that issue.

[3] This is a relatively rare problem – I have only seen a handful of CVs of ABD graduate students with less than 2 pages of publications, accomplishments, teaching experience, and presentations. Even so, a thin CV is often a foreshadowing of an inauspicious job market run: not one person from that handful fared well on the academic job market.

7 Years Later Excerpt #6: Approaching Publication with the 2/2/2 System

By Trevor Hedberg

Well, it has been quite a while since the last entry in this series, folks. The last academic year had a combination of personal challenges (highlights include my car being stolen and wrecked due to a pernicious TikTok challenge and battling COVID for 2 weeks despite having all the shots) and professional obligations (mostly making good on commitments made during the pandemic or tied to my first year of employment here in Arizona) that made it difficult to blog with any consistency. But I have returned to working on this guide to graduate school and hope to release a full draft for community feedback before the fall semester begins.

Not so long ago on the Cocoon, there was some discussion about how important publications are for improving one's job market prospects. My general impression is that they matter a good deal, particularly if your PhD-granting institution is not distinguished. Publications are one of the main ways you can distinguish yourself despite lacking prestigious origins. So in this excerpt, I discuss the approach I used to secure several publications in peer-reviewed journals while in graduate school. It is certainly not the only viable strategy but one that worked well for me.

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After 2 or 3 years of graduate school, you will have developed many papers while completing your graduate coursework. Not all of them will contain publishable ideas, but some will. At this juncture, you should revise those papers with the aim of getting some of them published. Unfortunately, trying to revise all of them while simultaneously developing new material (which you will be doing throughout graduate school) is not a preferable strategy.[1] A better strategy is to balance the development of new ideas with the refinement of old ones. There are many ways to strike this balance, but I favor a method I call the 2/2/2 system. The goal of the system is to meet 3 conditions:

1. Have 2 papers under review at journals or (if applicable) at other stages of the publication process (e.g., awaiting editor feedback, awaiting proofs).
2. Have 2 papers fully drafted and undergoing revisions.
3. Have 2 paper ideas in development.

Doubts about continuing on in academia: to carry on, or not?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, Questioning Their Career asks:

I'm close to finishing my PhD - I could be done this coming year if I so choose - and I'm not sure what to do next. I'm just not sure that I really like this work anymore. In the last month or so, I have absolutely dreaded the very thought of writing, and even just talking about philosophy, whether with professor, friends, or students, feels painful at times. I know this is a common reaction to finishing up a dissertation - none of my friends have liked their work by the end of it - and so this could just be the result of burnout. I also know that I now am closer to a professional philosopher than I've ever been, though. I have a much clearer sense of what the job is now than I ever did in the past. I don't think I should just dismiss my current antipathy because it might go away in the future.

I also currently have an opportunity to pursue a very different kind of work that I have good reasons to think I could find deeply meaningful and enjoyable, and my life on that path would be much easier if I started the pursuit sooner rather than later. I plan to finish my dissertation regardless, but my plans for going on the job market and all that would entail would seriously conflict with my ability to start on this alternate path.

This has all left me feeling deeply conflicted. I've poured so much of myself into pursuing this degree and a position in this profession. Being an academic feels like a deep part of me. I've also, historically, loved it. It's sometimes been bad just like any job, but that's never made me doubt that I should pursue it. It feels like I could be throwing something away needlessly because of a temporary setback.

I'm hoping for some insight into what sorts of factors have lead folks either to decide to carry on with academia despite some significant doubts or to leave the profession. I think hearing about others' experiences would help me to better understand whether what I'm experiencing now is a case of mere burnout or something more serious. Thank you all so much for any insight you might have!

I'm sorry to hear that the OP is going though this, and I empathize. It is a great and very understandable query, and I'm curious to hear from readers.

7 Years Later Excerpt #5: The Costs of Relocation

For those waiting for me to continue this series, I thank you for your patience. Now that I have completed my 2000-mile move from Ohio to Arizona and gotten somewhat settled into my new job, I will be continuing this series of snippets from my in-progress guide to graduate school in philosophy. Since the job hunting season is right around the corner, I'm going to focus my next few posts on the job market and related topics. This post focuses on the costs of relocation – something that graduate students and other early career philosophers should take into account with respect to the jobs they pursue and how long they stay on the market. I include this in the guide because this is one of the costs of the job market that I could not properly evaluate when I was going on the market for the first time.

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One of the costs of pursuing academic employment is that you will often have to relocate in pursuit of long-term employment. Looking back, I believe this is one of the hardest costs to explain and quantify to graduate students. In this post, I’m going to explain some of the challenges associated with relocation and reflect a little on them.

1. Relocation costs money. It’s expensive to move across the country (or potentially to a different country) whether you are physically moving your possessions from your current residence or selling/donating your possessions and buying new things. If you’re moving to a new apartment, there will also be security deposits and the first month’s rent to pay. Not only is this expensive, but you are also likely to have a gap in your pay. I officially graduated from the University of Tennessee in May 2017. I started my first post-graduate position in early August that summer, but because of the way pay cycles worked and the lag in getting all my information into the HR system, I did not receive my first paycheck for that position until the second week of September. That translates to over 3 months without any income. Depending on the distance you are moving, whether your new position comes with a moving allowance, and how long you have to sustain yourself with no income, you may well need more than $10,000 on hand to complete your move. During my 3 relocations (Tennessee to Florida, Florida to Ohio, Ohio to Arizona), the lowest amount of money I needed to cover costs without taking on debt was between $5000 and $6000.
2. Relocation requires a lot of paperwork. In the United States, moving states means changing vehicle registration and insurance agents. You’ve also got to update your address on all your financial and postal accounts and get a new driver’s license. You’ll have to start a new utilities account, get your home cable and/or internet installed, and make sure all the relevant utility accounts at your previous address were properly closed. There will also be a ton of things to complete as part of being a new hire. None of these items is all that daunting by itself, but the sheer quantity of it all can feel overwhelming.
3. Relocation is physically demanding. One component of moving is the actual process of putting new items inside your home, transporting books to your new office space, assembling the new furniture you purchased, organizing clothes and other household items in your personal space, and so on. This is not all that exhausting in most instances, but doing these sorts of things for several hours a day for a whole week will leave most people rather drained.
4. Relocation breaks routine. Everything you did in your previous place of residence has to be re-learned. Your drive to work is different, your grocery shopping is different, the campus layout is different, and your daily plans are different. Depending on where you moved, the weather and culture may also be very different. One of the things that allows us to focus our cognitive energy on our research and teaching is the fact that so much of what we do is practically automated – we have done it the same way so often that we do not have to think about it. Moving forces you to re-establish all those habits, and that makes the first several weeks after a move rather mentally taxing.
5. Relocation disrupts social networks. In some ways, it is easier now to maintain long-distance relationships than it has ever been. Nevertheless, moving somewhere else often puts a strain on relationships that were established with people in your former place of residence. Additionally, in your new location, it is highly unlikely that you will have enough established connections to replace the friends or family that you are leaving behind. (This is not true if you are moving to somewhere you previously lived, but philosophers rarely have much choice in where they get their first job – you’re very unlikely to be in this situation.) The result is that you have to rebuild your social support network, which can take a long time.
6. Relocation undercuts motivation. Because so many appointments in academic philosophy are short, temporary contracts (namely, 1–3 years), those who relocate often face the prospect of relocating again in short order. This makes it difficult to fully invest in your current community or university. What’s the point of becoming good friends with a bunch of people just to leave them behind in a year or two? What’s the point of doing a bunch of volunteer work for your department when you have no prospects for another contract? Some may be able to push these questions aside and stay motivated, but they are hard to dismiss.
7. Relocation alters one’s temporal perspective. One effect of repeatedly going on the job market and relocating is that your timeline becomes incredibly short-term. During my first appointment as a postdoc, my mentality at the outset was something like this: “What can I do in the next year to make myself a stronger candidate on the job market?” Since you’ve got to be job market ready by September (October 1st at the latest), you’ve only got about 1 year to improve your credentials if your job starts in August, and it's a 2-year position. But this kind of outlook narrows your focus to short-term goals – things that can be accomplished in a year or less. That makes it difficult to entertain bigger, grander projects, and it also places considerable pressure on you to produce during the shortened timetable you have. This problem is even more acute if your position is for only a single year: by the time you complete the moving process, you will already be contemplating your next move!
8. Relocation is demoralizing. Most people start settling down and carving out a stable life for themselves in their early 30s – some even earlier. If you’re an academic philosopher, the odds are that you will not be one of these people. You will watch your friends establish themselves where they live and solidify their jobs while you continue to travel across the country in hopes of permanent employment.
9. Relocation strains families. I am not married and have no children, but for those who have a spouse and/or children, frequent relocation multiplies some of the costs on this list. In some respects, it does make the move more bearable since you have people with you who are sharing that experience. But it also means that there will be much more to do to complete the moving process. Academic couples may also encounter the all-too-common scenario where they hold jobs at different institutions.

When I made my move from Kansas to Tennessee to start graduate school, I was excited to move and start something new. In some ways, I felt the same way after starting my first postdoc – I was ready to be done with graduate school and wanted to start new projects, teach new classes, and so on. But after a while, this enthusiasm fades. My recent relocation to Arizona marks my 4th state of residence in the last 6th years. That sounds extreme, but many in the profession have much more nomadic career trajectories than mine. If you’re considering a career in philosophy, it’s worth asking yourself how many times you’re willing to move while you’re on the market. How often are you willing to bear the costs of relocation?

7 Years Later Excerpt #4: Student Evaluations

Given that many of us have just had our semesters conclude, I thought it would be appropriate to share a snippet that focuses on how graduate students should assess the end-of-semester evaluations that they receive from their students. If you have additional or different advice on how to interpret or react to these evaluations, feel free to mention it in the comments.

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At the end of each semester, students will have an opportunity to evaluate their courses. In doing so, they will score you (usually on a 5-point scale) and the course on a wide range of metrics. There is some variance across institutions, but they are typically asked to rate things like how much they learned in the course, how much the instructor helped the students learn, how well the instructor knew the material, how organized the course was, and their perceptions of the course as a whole. If you’re a teaching assistant, the questions will be a little more specific to your interactions with students in discussion sections.

As you will learn after your first semester of teaching, reading these evaluations can be disheartening. Even if the numerical scores are reasonably good, there will almost always be some written comments that are not very complimentary. Sometimes, they will insult your character. Other times, they will disparage your course or your teaching style or make weird insinuations about your personal beliefs. What’s the appropriate reaction to student evaluations?

The first important piece of advice is not to overreact. Student evaluations are notoriously unreliable indicators of the quality of instruction. Here are a few of their documented shortcomings:

• The empirical literature on student evaluations generally shows that they do not correlate with student learning or teaching effectiveness.
• Course evaluations tend to correlate with students’ expected grades. Other things equal, an easier course – where a higher number of A grades are given – will result in more favorable evaluations than a more difficult course. As a result, some have argued that student evaluations contribute to grade inflation and encourage less rigorous teaching.
• Typically, all students enrolled in your course will be allowed to complete course evaluations, even if they do not regularly attend class. Thus, some students who complete evaluations may have a deeply inaccurate sense of what a typical class session is like.
• Student evaluations can be affected significantly by arbitrary factors, such as whether or not students have access to cookies when completing their evaluations.
• Student evaluations tend to be biased against female instructors. Overall, men are perceived as more knowledgeable and as having better leadership skills even though students appear to learn just as much from women as men. These biases may be more pronounced in large courses.
• Even assuming these evaluations are unbiased and reliable measures of student learning, they are still too imprecise to be an accurate way of assessing the quality of instructors’ teaching relative to their peers.

There are also other problems associated with interpreting student feedback even if we bracket these considerations. One common problem, especially in larger courses, is that written feedback on these assessments tends to be internally inconsistent. Sometimes you may see one comment that praises your passion for teaching while another laments that you are not enthusiastic about teaching. One student will regard your lectures as boring while another praises them as extremely interesting. The most recent example of this in my own teaching occurred when I received comments that said one of my courses contained too many readings and contained too much material while simultaneously receiving comments that said the course did not cover enough content. When you have directly contradictory feedback, it is often difficult to know which perspective is more accurate.

Another problem is that students sometimes base their assessments of your teaching on claims that are just plain false. Students will claim you do nothing but lecture even if you devote significant class time to discussion and other in-class activities. They may accuse you of grading short answer responses based solely on whether you agree with their opinion. In some cases, they will make remarks that demonstrate that they do not understand course policies. Written feedback based on demonstrably false claims should be disregarded.

As a teaching assistant, you will also sometimes be held accountable for things beyond your control. Students might comment on your evaluations that they did not like the exam formats or textbook choice, but as a teaching assistant, the primary instructor makes decisions about course content and assessment. You will usually have extremely limited – if any – influence on these choices. Students may also make direct comparisons between you and the instructor: a charismatic and experienced professor may indirectly cause you to be scored lower than you would be otherwise since you will look worse by comparison.

Overall, you should approach end-of-semester evaluations with a healthy skepticism. However, these evaluations do often play a role in tenure, promotion, and the distribution of teaching awards. They will also be an important component of your teaching portfolio if you elect to apply for academic jobs. Thus, they should not be ignored. As a general rule, you should strive to maintain about a 4/5 (or equivalent) on your numerical evaluation scores once you get a few years into graduate school. Evaluations with these scores will generally keep you competitive with other applicants: higher scores are obviously better, but most faculty are aware of the problems with student evaluations. Hiring decisions are unlikely to be made solely based on marginal differences in the numerical scores on student evaluations.

Use your initial teaching experiences as opportunities to define your teaching style and improve your weaknesses. Look for patterns in your student evaluations, and if you notice that you are persistently scoring low on a metric, then take some steps to address that in future courses. Most importantly, seek feedback from faculty in your department – especially those who observe your teaching directly – about ways in which you can improve. As you get better at teaching competently, your evaluations should improve (unless they were very high to begin with). Finally, remember that it will often be impossible to please everyone: some students, despite your best efforts, will not like you or your class. So do not lose sleep over occasional negative feedback. It’s a persistent feature of almost all evaluations, even those that are excellent overall.

7 Years Later Excerpt #3: Teaching Competently

In the previous post in this series, I discussed how to approach leading discussion sections. This time around, I'm broadening the scope to the fundamentals of teaching competently. I'll have at least one more post on teaching after this. Afterwards, I'll probably turn to some other aspects of graduate school, such as long-term planning or job market preparation. 

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When you first start teaching, you might think you should aspire to do it well. By teaching well, I mean teaching in ways that captivate students, educate them effectively, assess their mastery fairly and comprehensively, provide ample support to students in need, and respect university guidelines and regulations. In the abstract, this all sounds great, and it’s an admirable ambition to want to teach well. However, for those new to teaching, it’s not realistic. Teaching well requires a level of skill and expertise that early career teachers will almost never be able to achieve. Even the few newcomers to teaching who have the ability to teach well should probably not try to teach well at that stage of their careers. This notion might strike you as counterintuitive, so let me elaborate a bit.

Teaching well is difficult and requires a substantial amount of time if you aren’t an experienced instructor. I recall anecdotes of graduate students telling me about how they devoted 30-40 hours per week to teaching a single course of 25-30 students. Those courses may have been amazing, but this behavior is not admirable or prudent. As a graduate student, you must balance teaching responsibilities with a variety of other goals: making progress toward your degree, submitting papers to conferences and journals, participating in department events, and so on. Devoting 30-40 hours per week to teaching a single course does not leave enough time to adequately prioritize these other commitments – at least not if one wants to maintain good mental health and avoid burnout. Moreover, once you finish graduate school, you will never be able to devote that amount of time to a single course. If you obtain a faculty position, you will probably teach at least 3 courses per term, and they might all be different subjects: you definitely won’t be able to devote 30-40 hours to each one. That means you should aim to develop teaching strategies that can later be extended to contexts where your teaching load is significantly higher.

Here’s the general point: trying to be an exemplary teacher when you’re just getting started with solo teaching is not an appropriate goal. Instead, you should aim to teach competently. As I use this phrase, teaching competently means to teach in a satisfactory or acceptable, but not outstanding, way. Teaching competently involves the same general goals as teaching well but sets the standard for success a bit lower. You don’t need to captivate students to teach competently: it suffices to maintain the motivation of those who are engaged and avoid turning off the remaining students. Teaching competently does not require that you be a master of test design and assessment –  something that requires many courses’ worth of exam creation and refinement – it is enough to design your exams so that course content and exam material align and that students have clear expectations regarding exam content.

7 Years Later Excerpt #2: Leading Discussion Sections

By Trevor Hedberg

In the last entry, I discussed how to handle grade inquiries. This time around, I consider how to lead discussion sections -- one of the other core responsibilities of a typical teaching assistant.

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As a teaching assistant, one of your central responsibilities will usually be leading 1-3 discussion sections each week of the semester. Typically, you’ll have 20-30 students in each section, and they will last 50 minutes, but there is some variance across institutions. So what exactly do you do to lead a discussion section? To some extent, it will depend on the instructor. In some instances, the instructor wanted me to cover some new material during these discussion sections; in other cases, I was told to just get the students talking and not worry about presenting any new course content. Sometimes, I was asked to administer quizzes or conduct assignments; sometimes, I didn’t have to do that.

The one key aspect of a discussion section is that you are supposed to get the students to discuss aspects of the course content. This might seem pretty basic, but you may not receive much direct instruction on how to get the students talking productively. (Some faculty members seem to think that graduate students will just figure it out.) Moreover, if a discussion section is not going well – that is, if the students aren’t talking – then it can get very uncomfortable very quickly. Additionally, if students feel like discussion sections are boring or pointless, their disengagement will get more pronounced as the semester progresses. That’s an outcome you obviously want to avoid, so here are some pointers on having good discussion sections:

• Always present a bit of material to the students – even if it is not required. You might think that you can just come to class with a list of prepared questions about the week’s material, ask the students those questions, and see where the conversation goes. That might work sometimes, but it’s unreliable. Some students will not have done the assigned readings for the week, and some students probably missed at least one of the week’s lectures. That means a large portion of students may not be familiar enough with the material to respond to your questions productively. Thus, you should always present a little material to the students, even if it is only a few of some of the key ideas or themes that were already covered in the week’s main lectures.
• Don’t base all your questions on the reading material. Echoing an important point above, you cannot assume that everyone in class (or even most of the students in class) will have read and understood the assigned reading for the week. If you want to dig into a key idea from the reading, make sure you review this material with the students first. But in addition to that, make sure you have a few general questions on tap that students can respond to even if they have not read one word of the assigned reading.
• Use thought experiments. Students tend to respond well to thought experiments – the trolley problem, the experience machine, Mary the colorblind neuroscientist, the prisoner’s dilemma, and so on. While there’s a legitimate debate to be had about the usefulness of thought experiments as support for premises in philosophical arguments, they remain effective pedagogical tools for getting students to reflect on philosophical problems. If you can identify a thought experiment that’s relevant to what you’re covering, consider using it 
• Use real-world examples. Many students, especially in introductory level courses that they are taking to fulfill a general education requirement, struggle to see the relevance of philosophy to everyday life. You can diminish that skepticism by basing your discussion in part on real-world cases that illustrate the key concepts for that week’s course material. This strategy may be easier to employ in ethics courses (since ethical dilemmas manifest in the real world frequently), but if you’re creative and willing to do some digging online, you may be surprised what you can find.
• Use videos. Students nowadays read less frequently than students from several decades ago but consume far more visual media. A short, relevant video to get discussion rolling can be effective, especially with the wealth of free, easy-to-browse videos available on YouTube.
• Don’t allow only a few students to dominate discussion. Some students will obviously be more prone to participate in discussion than others, but you don’t want your discussion section of 30 students to consist of you talking exclusively with only a handful of them. If you have trouble getting others to participate, consider having them work in groups or write down an answer to a prompted question at the start of class. Some students will be more comfortable participating when they have written remarks they can read or otherwise use to form their answer.
• Get to know your students. Your discussion sections will usually be small: 20-25 students. Find a way to learn your students’ names – either via the creation of a seating chart, sheer memorization, or some other method. Part of making these discussion sections go well involves crafting a relationship with your students so that they are more willing to participate. Also be willing to talk to them before class officially starts. Be polite, and be approachable.

There are certainly other techniques that could be employed, but these are my starter strategies. Do you all have any others that graduate teaching assistants should employ?

7 Years Later Excerpt #1: Handling Grade Inquiries

By Trevor Hedberg

For the first few excerpts from 7 Years Later, I'm going to focus on teaching. Most do not have much preparation for undergraduate teaching prior to the start of graduate school, and I found it to be one of the more challenging aspects of graduate school when I was getting started.

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One of the more awkward aspects of being a grader, teaching assistant, or instructor is handling students who confront you about the grade they have received. Addressing grade inquiries is an inevitable part of being an instructor – it’s not a situation unique to being a graduate student. No matter how clear your grading criteria or how much class time you devote to recapping mistakes from the most recent exam, there will always be some students who ask you for more information about why they received their grade. However, as a graduate student, these interactions can be particularly vexing since you will have less experience dealing with them. There are at least three distinct types of grade inquiries, and different responses are appropriate to each one.

First, there are grade inquiries that boil down to grade entry errors. One type  involves the score on Canvas or Blackboard (or whatever learning platform your institution uses) not matching the score listed on the assignment itself. Another might involve too many (or too few) points being deducted on a particular question. Imagine a “-3” next to a 30-point question but a numbered score on the page of 25/30. Resolving these kinds of inquiries is straightforward: confirm that there’s a mistake in how the assignment was scored or how the grade was recorded, thank the student for reporting it to you, and correct the score. Obviously, You don’t want these grading errors to happen often – not all students will notice them, which means they sometimes result in inaccurate assessments of students’ knowledge, and persistent errors of this type will cause students to lose confidence in your professional competence. However, you will grade enough assignments that some mistakes of this type will happen. That’s okay; just correct them and move on.

The second type of grade inquiry, which is probably the most common, involves genuine misunderstanding. This is a case where a student sincerely does not understand why they received a particular score on a question or assignment. This could be because written comments given on the assignment were too minimal, they don’t know how to interpret the feedback, or they were absent when you went over the exam in class. Handling these inquiries in philosophy courses tends to be more challenging than doing so in courses like physics or calculus. In STEM courses, instructors can usually reference an answer key and explain how the student made an error in their calculation or defined some term incorrectly. But explaining why a student’s argument is not very strong can be trickier.

7 Years Later: An Introduction

By Trevor Hedberg

I spent a lot of time in graduate school digging up information about what I should expect during graduate school and what I should do to be competitive for academic employment when I finished my dissertation. Back then, information about these topics existed, but it was scattered across a random assemblage of online resources, and the the authors of these blog posts and short guides sometimes disagreed about the best methods for writing papers, finding a suitable work/life balance, teaching effectively, and so on. Things have definitely improved since that time. There are more avenues for graduate students to learn this information, and discussions of these topics have progressed enough that some points of consensus have emerged on these matters. But even now, the main thing I was looking for back in 2010 and 2011 has not been produced.

What I wanted as a graduate student was a single document that answered the many questions I had about graduate and professional life. How do I write a course syllabus? What is the proper conduct at academic conferences? How do I complete a revise-and-resubmit so that the paper gets published? How do I prepare for my first job search? You get the idea. And I did find answers to these questions eventually, but I wanted those answers all in one place and presented in a unified and cohesive voice. Ideally, this document would have also provided some additional resources related to the topics under discussion. The best I could find was typically a short guide that covered a small fraction of the relevant aspects of graduate school or focused on just one in particular (such as how to write publishable papers).

After a while, I decided it might be worth trying to write the guide that I had been unable to find as a graduate student. After working on it intermittently for many years, I am finally getting close to its completion. My plan is to release 7 Years Later: Surviving Graduate School in Philosophy sometime during the upcoming summer. The main title alludes to both the fact that 7 years is about the average length of time it takes a typical graduate student in the humanities to earn a PhD and the fact that my own time in graduate school (obtaining both an MA and PhD) took about 7 years. The broad framework for 7 Years has been outlined on my website for the last several months. Frankly, it has ballooned to a much larger size than I had originally envisioned: it may be about 60,000 words when it is complete.

Leading up to the guide’s full release, I’ll be publishing snippets of the guide here on the Philosophers’ Cocoon. Some of the guide’s content is based on blog posts I’ve written here in the past few years, but the content I will share in these snippets will be new. My hope is that I will get feedback on some of this content that I can then incorporate into the released version. I’m not sure yet how many of these snippets I will end up publishing here, but I’ll be starting with a few related to teaching as a graduate student. The first one of those will go up next week.