ABSTRACT
This form provides 20 items on which the student can evaluate his or her professor, including, for example, seven points on career development and two on research. Not one of these 20 different points mentions helping a student to get new ideas or build new apparatus, and helping students write clearly is left to the end of the list. In other words, the current practice of student evaluations of teachers in a class is to be extended to the performance of thesis advisors, with the difference that the graduate students are given, in advance, a 20-item checklist of possible professorial negligence; to be more succinct, the complaints about mentoring are provided before
the act. This is, to put it mildly, startling. It does not ask the student’s opinion, but instead suggests what that opinion should be. The ATRMF report urged a thesis advisor to be a friend. It is not quite clear how a professor can be a friend to a student who has a negative rating sheet in hand, ready to send to the department chair.
