Penn in the News

Carmen Guerra of the Perelman School of Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center talks about the importance of colon cancer screening.

There’s mounting evidence suggesting that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable. But are these evaluations, commonly referred to as SET, so bad that they’re actually better at gauging students’ gender bias and grade expectations than they are at measuring teaching effectiveness? A new paper argues that’s the case, and that evaluations are biased against female instructors in particular in so many ways that adjusting them for that bias is impossible.

The Supreme Court on Monday turned away an appeal that sought to make it easier to erase student loans in bankruptcy, sidestepping an issue that has become a focal point for consumer advocates and lawmakers as millions of borrowers fall behind on their payments.

The pressure on colleges to step up prevention and handle sexual-assault cases more effectively has intensified since April 2011. That’s when the federal government signaled stricter enforcement of the gender-equity law Title IX, which compels colleges to resolve students’ reports of rape, whether or not the police are involved. Students began filing federal complaints against their institutions, alleging missteps at nearly every juncture. This project tracks federal investigations of colleges for possible violations of Title IX involving reported sexual violence.

Robert Kurzban of the School of Arts & Sciences joins a conversation about hypocrisy.

Rogers Smith of the School of Arts & Sciences is mentioned for advancing what he called the “multiple tradition thesis” of American political culture.

To increase the socioeconomic diversity of their campuses, selective colleges should create a "poverty preference" for high-achieving low-income applicants, a new report says. The report, released on Monday by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, urges institutions to make the admissions process more equitable. The authors describe the current system as "a classic case of interest-group politics gone awry," in which poor students lack champions and face long odds of being admitted.

Teaching an online course that 49,000 students have signed up for presents an unprecedented challenge when it comes to an important aspect of instruction: knowing your audience. I could see from my course "dashboard" in Coursera that the students hailed from 190 countries, with 6 percent from India, 31 percent from the United States, and so on, but these numbers only took me so far. I wondered which places had lots of students earning a passing grade? Which places had students who were really engaged with the course? Since I’m a cartographer, it made sense to make some maps.

Jonathan Supovitz of the Graduate School of Education comments on the importance of classroom size.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard argument last month in the latest constitutional challenge to race-based preferences in university admissions. The court's decision in Fisher v. University of Texas may determine affirmative action's future. It may also reveal the extent of the conservative justices' avowed commitments to judicial restraint. To understand why Fisher has this significance, recall the court's holding in June that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. In that case, Obergefell v. Hodges, the four most conservative justices dissented.