Comments on: Teaching Evaluations

By: David Hunter

David Hunter — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 04:39:31 +0000

I just got my evaluations back from Massey University and was amused to find that I got a 4.8/5 response to the statement: The lecturer encourages active learning. I asked my class what active learning was after the evaluations were done. Only a handful of people had any idea. This to me represents the main problem of standardised testing, those writing the tests and those taking them are standardly not coming from the same perspective

By: Jill

Jill — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 12:49:31 +0000

We don’t have teaching evaluations where I work, at the University of Bergen in Norway, and I don’t think they’re ever used in Norway in the way they are in the States, as a way of working out who’ll get to keep their job. Lecturers are expected to run evaluations of some kind, but how we do it is up to us, and usually the information isn’t centralised. Evaluations are rarely numerical – I’ve been told to make sure that I ask the students questions in a way that will actually help me improve the course. The two key questions I use, on the advice of more experienced teachers, are: 1. What would you do differently if you were in charge of teaching this course next semester? 2. What should definitely be done the same way as this semester? That gets you constructive criticism that you can use – and makes sure that you know what you’re doing right, as well. Some semesters we’ve let the students organise the feedback themselves -that is, we ask them to group themselves and for each group to discuss an aspect of the course, and then to present it to the class. The class then comments, the group responsible for that aspect of the course takes notes and hands the collated notes to the teacher at the end. We got the idea for this system from Torill Mortensen. In Arts and Humanities, each course is supposed to be more formally evaluated every two years, but the format is up to the lecturer. The student services people set up the electronic questionaire when my course was evaluated last semester, and they did the hard work of getting students to answer, and analysing the results, but I had the final word on which questions students were to be asked, and the emphasis was always on how to improve the course, not on whether or not I was good enough. This is one reason I like Norwegian universities.

By: will

will — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 18:07:43 +0000

>A few years ago I did a study on evaluation and found that most people have a narrow window of possible numerical evaluations they will give.< That’s quite right. I recently evaluated the worst instructor of my undergraduate career, an octogenarian German who taught transistor physics by pointing at equation after equation and graph after graph and rambling. I gave him a 3 for “competent”; after all, I was able to get enough of a flavor of the subject in lecture that I was able to teach myself. That’s the lowest rating I’ve ever given a professor. I don’t think my fellow students were as kind, however.

By: will

will — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 18:04:54 +0000

By: h. e. baber

h. e. baber — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 17:45:19 +0000

Radical thought: as anyone succeeded in abolishing teaching evaluations? I’m sick of being in a situation where I have to perform for students like a trained monkey. Students aren’t accountable when they do these evaluations and, even assuming good will it’s hard to avoid having their assessments colored by the very factors that we try so ard to filter out in hiring and other evaluation processes: sex, race and physical appearance. Universities as far as I can see did just as good a job in teaching before the 1970s or so when these evaluations were introduced. Initially they were supposed to be a good left-wing thing to empower students but, predictably, they became just another means for administrators and faculty in positions of power to put the screws on junior faculty. I’m tenured but I well remember the hoops I had to jump through—enough is enough!

By: lth

lth — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 15:13:01 +0000

Our Uni has a centralized, computerized module feedback system. Every student is emailed a link to the relevant online form to fill in – this means that even students who stopped coming to class can have a say.

By: Shai

Shai — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 08:08:02 +0000

“Anyway, the students basically have to take my word for this. They know nothing about the Athenian Assembly and I could be making it all up for all they know….” i took Kierkegaard and Nietzsche course first year, taught by someone who usually teaches a more general existentialism. i thought it was great at the time, but i’ve since learned that Nietzsche was mangled. i look at the evaluation for that semester and it’s rave reviews. “People who hate the class may have stopped coming. The department may take this into consideration, but I doubt that many students flipping through the eval book do” yeah, i’ve dropped several courses because i didn’t like how they were being taught or evaluated. at the time i regret not being able to stick it to whomever was responsible, but sometimes misgivings are generated when we fail, not the course. an illustration of the tendency to blame situation rather than disposition when doing something blameworthy like failing. so including these people won’t necessarily correct for perceived bias. “Professors they though were lively and interesting impressed me as spouting BS; the ones they thought dull I found careful scholars, people one could really learn from” false dilemma. anyhow, it doesn’t necessarily follow that students are unable to recognize quality. the semester becomes a long grind with a very boring lecturer and some students might be willing to trade some quality of argument for quality of delivery. especially when the course is an elective. if you really love the topic you can follow up by reading lots of secondary sources.

By: mv

mv — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 05:50:40 +0000

Observer – thanks for confirming something I’ve always suspected. Also, only people who actually show up on the day the forms are handed out get their opinions counted. People who hate the class may have stopped coming. The department may take this into consideration, but I doubt that many students flipping through the eval book do.

By: Erik

Erik — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 04:28:20 +0000

The best evaluations I ever got (not necessarily the most positive, but the most interesting and useful) came the one time I wrote the evaluation form myself. The course was honors freshman composition, and at the top of an otherwise blank page I asked one lone question: “What did you think of this course?” Almost everyone wrote at length. My department wasn’t too happy without numbers to crunch, but I didn’t really care.

By: h. e. baber

h. e. baber — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 03:55:07 +0000

I got trashed repeatedly for wardrobe and appearance. One particular class years ago was perfectly awful—they put stupid notes on my desk ridiculing me and, needless to say the evaluations were awful. About two years after the fact I happened to have a conversation with a student from that class and it came out that I’d been pregnant at the time. His response was, “Gosh, I’m sorry. We thought you were just built that way.”

By: Observer

Observer — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 23:08:30 +0000

I’ve found numerical student evaluations to generally be a weak indicator of professors ability. At best you can identify the real stinkers by reviewing evaluations from multiple classes. But you can’t rely on them to identify the best teachers. Here’s why: A few years ago I did a study on evaluation and found that most people have a narrow window of possible numerical evaluations they will give. That is, there won’t be a large numerical difference between their evaluation of their “best” and “worst” teachers. For example, suppose that you have a 5 point system (as we did), with 5 being “outstanding” and 1 being “poor”. A large segment of students will tend to rate everyone high, such that “4” is actually a weak rating and “3” is really bad. Another group will tend to cluster around 3 or 4, and another group will split ratings between 3 and 5. Only a few will ever venture into the 1 category, and that includes those who fit the definition “chronically discontent”. Most classes had at least one of this kind of person. I found that the average rating was not good predictor of teacher quality. That is, teacher who got a 4.8 average was not necessarily better than one who got a 4.65. In fact, it was clear that certain classes scored more poorly regardless of who taught them, and also that electives in general tended to score better than requisites. However, where the surveys were useful were for teachers who consistently had 3 or more students trash him/her with a lot of 1 ratings. Invariably, follow-up investigation revealed that such teachers were perceived as weak by most of their students … yet funnily enough their average ratings were still in the 4.5 range.

By: Mimiru

Mimiru — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 22:16:22 +0000

I suppose I should add that the TA for our Logic teacher had been in school about 8 years, a perpetual student or so. Anyhow I wrote in about the largest letters that I could IF YOU COULD, YOU SHOULD FIRE HIM. Why? Because he consistently graded our assignments wrong! On every assignment I turned in, there were 4-5 problems that I had the correct answer/process down and he had marked wrong. The fucking bastard.

By: Moebius Stripper

Moebius Stripper — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 20:45:14 +0000

Clayton, I can give you my university’s answer to your question: I am an adjunct at a medium-sized institution, on a four-month contract. My school is in the process of hiring some permanent faculty, and there was a possibility my contract would be renewed. The department head told me that his decision rested almost entirely on my evals. (Full disclosure: my evals were fine, and I was rehired.) I took issue with this; I’m glad that my school takes student feedback into consideration – I used to work for a school that didn’t care. However, I teach a required course – math – to nonmajors, most of whom would rather claw their eyes out than graph a parabola. I taught a challenging course, and my tests required students to apply their knowledge on the tests, not just cough it back. Class average was a C+ when evals were being taken. A colleague of mine taught math-lite, giving pretests before each midterm; these pretests were virtually identical to the actual tests, with only a few numbers changed. If the comments under his name on ratemyprofessors.ca are any indication, his students loved this. His class average when he took evals was a B, and his kids gushed over how nice he was. A month later, both of our classes the final, and my students kicked his students’ asses – but this wasn’t reflected in the student comments.

By: Jonathan Goldberg

Jonathan Goldberg — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 20:40:09 +0000

My memories of my long-ago aborted graduate student career is that when I took a course with undergraduates (or TA’d one) my evaluations were the opposite of theirs. Professors they though were lively and interesting impressed me as spouting BS; the ones they thought dull I found careful scholars, people one could really learn from. It’s a very small sample from long ago, but I’ve wondered about it ever since.

By: Clayton

Clayton — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 15:21:57 +0000

Just a quick question, What role do teacher evaluations actually play in the decision to hire somebody or in the department’s evaluation of the teacher? I think that many are quite sceptical of the idea that these evaluations generally provide useful information about a teacher’s ability or performance.