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JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2015 BizEd 57 SOUP KITCHEN ECONOMICS Three students pursuing master's degrees in economics at the University of North Texas College of Business in Denton have part- nered with the local charity Our Daily Bread to design a statistical model to forecast how many meals the soup kitchen should prepare each day. The students will analyze 14 years of historical data provided by the organiza- tion, as well as factors such as weather con- ditions, unemployment rates, and population growth. Associate professors of economics Michael McPherson and Margie Tieslau received a community engagement grant from UNT for the yearlong project, which began last spring. With such a predictive model, the soup kitchen will be able to use its donated funds more wisely, serving everyone who needs meals without wasting food, says McPherson. Once the soup kitchen project is com- pleted, Tieslau plans to use it as an example each spring in her forecasting class. Future students might not only improve the initial statistical model, she says, but also be inspired to volunteer their time and talents to other community organizations. Field Notes OpenStax College, a provider of free electronic textbooks based at Rice University in Houston, Tex- as, recently announced the addition of ten new titles to its catalog by 2017. Part of Rice's open educational resource efforts, OpenStax currently has four new titles in production. The ten additions, which will expand the catalog to 21 titles, will be created with the help of US$9.5 million in grants from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, bringing the foundation's total contri- bution to OpenStax to $18 million. For information, visit openstaxcollege.org. The Graduate Man- agement Admission Council, in partnership with publisher John Wiley & Sons, has added access to online content, videos, and study support to its annual print series of The Official Guide for GMAT Review study guides. The online content will include hundreds of retired GMAT questions, which students can customize by format and difficulty level. Visit mba.com/store for pur- chase information. Reeher, a fundraising software platform for uni- versities, recently launched its redesigned Targeter tool, with a new user interface, a search bar that supports quicker searches, a tool to allow custom queries of donor informa- tion, and a map where users can plot the density of donor relationships by region. Reeher also has added a new donor Rela- tionship Profile screen and a timeline of each donor's gifts, appeals, contacts, and other milestones from the last ten years. Visit www.reeher.com for more information. Do Student Evaluations Make Sense? Academics have long debated the validity of using student course evaluations as accurate measures of teaching performance. Some argue that results can be skewed by low student response rates, students' previous experience with the material, or the likelihood that students will judge professors who are teaching difficult courses more harshly than those teaching easier subjects. A recent paper by two educators from the University of California, Berkeley, make the argument that student evaluations, at least as the primary basis for promotion and tenure decisions, should be abandoned. Authors Philip B. Stark, professor and chair of the statistics department, and Richard Freishtat, senior consultant in the university's Center for Teaching and Learning, argue that qualitative, rather than quantitative, measures of teach- ing performance would be more effective ways to evaluate quality of teaching. These include in-class observations, in which faculty sit in on each other's lec- tures and offer detailed written feedback, as well as the creation and evaluation of teaching portfolios. Such measures were piloted in UC Berkeley's statistics department in spring 2013. The authors write that they believe these approaches "better reflect whether faculty are dedicated teachers" and "comprise a much fairer assessment" of teaching performance. "An Evaluation of Course Evaluations" is available at www.stat.berkeley. edu/~stark/Preprints/evaluations14.pdf. ILLUSTRATION BY 2COMMUNIQUÉ