The Impact of Relative Grade Expectations on Student Evaluation of Teaching

It is commonly accepted that student evaluation of teaching (SET) ratings are influenced by expected grades, and that faculty are able to 'buy' higher SET ratings by giving higher grades. Researchers have questioned whether there are limits to the ability to buy grades due to the possibility that students reward teachers for their relative grade as opposed to their absolute grade. In this paper we use SET data to investigate the relationship between SET ratings and relative grades. Similar to the prior literature, we find an indirect relationship between SET scores and historical grade performance averages (GPAs) but, we find the opposite result to be true when we examine the relationship between SET scores and expected grades earned by peers. Contrary to recent literature that suggests limits exist to an instructor's ability to purchase high SET scores when relative grades are considered, we find that the incentives to lower grading standards and buy higher SET ratings may actually be greater than has been thought in the past.

Reconstruction of Residual Stress in a Welded Plate Using the Variational Eigenstrain Approach

We present the formulation for finding the distribution of eigenstrains, i.e. the sources of residual stress, from a set of measurements of residual elastic strain (e.g. by diffraction), or residual stress, or stress redistribution, or distortion. The variational formulation employed seeks to achieve the best agreement between the model prediction and some measured parameters in the sense of a minimum of a functional given by a sum over the entire set of measurements. The advantage of this approach lies in its flexibility: different sets of measurements and information about different components of the stress-strain state can be incorporated. We demonstrate the power of the technique by analysing experimental data for welds in thin sheet of a nickel superalloy aerospace material. Very good agreement can be achieved between the prediction and the measurement results without the necessity of using iterative solution. In practice complete characterisation of residual stress states is often very difficult, due to limitations of facility access, measurement time or specimen dimensions. Implications of the new technique for experimental analysis are all the more significant, since it allows the reconstruction of the entire stress state from incomplete sets of data.Comment: 16 pages, 17 figure

DRIVERS OF DEMOGRAPHIC AND SOCIOECONOMIC SHIFTS AT THE BRIDGE RIVER SITE (EeRl4), BRITISH COLUMBIA

ABSTRACT Nowell, Sarah, M.A. Spring 2017 Anthropology Drivers of Demographic and Socioeconomic Shifts Regarding the Bridge River II – Bridge River III Transition at the Bridge River Village (EeRl4), British Columbia Chairperson: Dr. Anna Marie Prentiss The Bridge River site is located near the confluence of the Bridge and Fraser Rivers in the Mid-Fraser canyon near Lillooet, British Columbia. This region has long been popular for archaeologists seeking to understand the emergence of wealth-based inequality in complex hunter-gatherers. Housepit 54 is one of over 80 pithouses or s7ístken that was continuously occupied throughout most of the village history. It contains 17 intact anthropogenic or manmade floors, allowing archaeologists to address many types of cultural variation over time at the household level. This thesis seeks to understand the underlying processes that drive socioeconomic and demographic growth as evidenced by variation in lithic technology as well as feature contents and distribution as they relate to the structural expansion that occurred between two occupational floors. It draws heavily on ethnographic record, ethnoarchaeology, household archaeology, and past studies of complex hunter-gatherers to determine whether this expansion might have resulted from a demographic spike that necessitated the structural addition, or whether members of the household held feasting events or other social activities designed to increase household status and attract new members. While access to prestige and non-local lithic materials does not change in a way that indicates an increase in production related to feasting and social events, analysis of feature types and locations in either occupational floor does show that the changes that occur in storage strategy as well as hearth density and placement indicate that there was a shift to a more centralized or communal household organization. This thesis finds that the feasting hypothesis is the most likely scenario and discusses ways in which to expand this line of inquiry in future studies