Difficulty

Hiding in the back of lecture theatre with VW during medical grand round, and we had some casual discussion on our teaching evaluation system.

The double gold medalist sighed, "There's really a need to have a more objective way to evaluate our teaching - the current system simply doesn't work out as it planned."

I told him I could think of two ways to do so:

1. The number of student who take the subject (useful for non-medical university students who can choose which course to take).
   
2. The result of public examination (e.g. in USA, where medical school graduates need to sit for a licencing examination).

Unfortunately neither of them is suitable for our medical students - all subjects are compulsory, and there is no open examination.

With all these considerations, I was forced to conclude, "The only thing that the university could do is to pay less attention to the result of the current teaching evaluation - certainly not to use it as a dagger over our back. The system at the moment, if remains unchanged, could serve only one purpose: our officials could appear to be doing something on this area."

Hearing what I said, VW seemed more depressed than ever.