I know this was a perennial subject on RYS before CM. But I got last semester's evals about five days ago and it still sticks in me like rusty nail, twisting and turning.
This batch included the normal contradictory "Hated having the textbook online" / "Loved that I could read the textbook from anywhere and that it was free" or "Hated the essays: more discussions!" / "Hated the discussions: more essays!" and "Best instructor ever!" / "She doesn't seem to know anything [because I know everything and she didn't reinforce that]."
But there were a series of really odd ball accusations that I can't seem to shake.
- The one person who accused me at length of hating cops. Wait, one of my students was a cop??
- Check this one out: I SHOULD HAVE CAME OUT OF THIS CLASS WITH AN A. MAKING A B IS OK BUT AN A IS A LOT BETTER. I AM VERY DISAPOINTED. [Good one, sweetcheeks. Thanks for yelling the feedback. I apparently didn't get through to you at all. ]
- And the lies!! I had 3 students mark that I was "poor" on the 48-hour turnaround for page-long homework. And I have a PERFECT record on that. LIARS!! Little fuckers.
And I'll admit it: I care because the last 3 years I got insanely high numbers on my evals. So something slipped this year. Maybe I need to hold their hands a bit more. Give them a batch of cookies. Send them an email of their progress so far. Or give them all As because they are just so damned cute. Ought to raise my numbers!!
I'm a grad student and I'm just starting to realize that students are very changeable in their opinions of professors. I listened to them complain one semester about a language professor being too rigid, too controlling and not at all good. The following semester those same students missed that professor and complained that their current professor didn't provide enough structure. They were left longing for the good old days of rigidity.
ReplyDeleteMaybe something didn't slip, maybe you just struck complainers instead of gold.
I've stopped reading evals, on the advice of posters at RYS. I'm much happier for it.
ReplyDeleteEvals have 0 to do with reality.
I have my husband read them, and have him tell me anything that might conceivably be useful. Then I file them away.
ReplyDeleteI've knew a business prof that actually spend time in class on professionalism in student evaluations. His theory: They don't realize that this counts as a professional setting that requires professional responses.
You hate cops? According to a student a few years ago, I hate women, particularly attractive ones. And I've never gotten 100% on speaking English (my native language) clearly. Guess it's my NJ accent - I sound like Snooki.
ReplyDeleteI once had a class that I still refer to as "the class from Hell (TCFH)." They were a bunch of whiny complainers and I did not get a single positive result from any of their evals. The next semester I had two classes from Heaven (The Godsends). They learned. They did well. They understood the math. And they joked around with me. TCFH still haunts my dreams. But...I was and am a good teacher.
ReplyDeleteI still read my evals, but I no longer lose sleep over them. Let the fuckers think they know more about math than I do. I only studied it for 7 years at the post-high-school level). They studied it for what, maybe a year and a half at the post-high-school level? So, there's no way I know anything more than they do. ;)
Mathsquatch out.
I'm not sure they lie, at least not deliberately; it's just that, as far as they're concerned, what they feel to be true is true (see BlackDog's link on connecting with millenials, below). In a full-fledged adult, this would be a sign of mental illness; in our students, it's probably just a sign of immaturity, aided and abetted by parental/cultural forces.
ReplyDeleteI like Cleo's approach; maybe I need to acquire a husband (or borrow Cleo's for an hour or so per semester -- or would that be adultery?) Or maybe somebody should start an evaluation reading and summarizing service; I'm sure there would be a market, albeit an impecunious one.
Sorry about the extra ). It was not edited out carefully enough. I have fired my editing squirrel.
ReplyDeleteMathsquatch out.
Picking up on amy's comment, I wonder what an "exit evaluation" that asked graduating seniors to pick the 5-10 classes on their transcripts that they'd found most useful would look like? I wonder whether the list would be the same 10 years later?
ReplyDeleteI'm hesitant to suggest the idea, since I know both the uses Deans and Provosts like to make of uncontextualized numbers, and the ability of self-identified "A students" who received Bs to hold a grudge, but, assuming they were used purely for informational purposes, I'd like to see the results.
I like Cassandra's idea. As long as they are responsible for providing a narrative justification for their top five. In a way, that is probably the moment they are going to give something more meaningful in terms of feedback.
ReplyDeleteAs for regular evals, I never look at the quantitative questions, and I try to keep the narrative portion on topic by asking them to answer a couple of specific questions about the course. That way they don't waste ink explaining what a sexy beast I am.
Seriously though, the responses rarely mean much, unless you are way below (or above, I suppose) departmental mean. I used to teach at a school that asked the students to rate the professor's "sensitivity" whatever the fuck that meant. One term I decided to try to score a standard deviation below the mean on sensitivity. I almost made it. Oddly enough, my other scores stayed pretty much the same, so I guess it was possible to be totally insensitive, but still get good ratings. After that, I lost interest in looking at the numbers.
I used to shit on evaluations until the shitheads in my department sandbagged me on my evaluations during my interim tenure review.
ReplyDeleteMy response? First, a hearty middle fingers to the tenured shitheads who neither research nor teach. Second, a more determined focus on my research and publishing.
I want out of this fifth-rate school with its lazy ass students, fuckhead IT department, and shithead colleagues.
Where's the hooch?
I have letters from students past telling me that my class "changed their lives." And then there are the students who sleep through it...
ReplyDeleteI really dislike being stuck in a place where my evaluations might impact something like my getting a job, or as in textpat's case, tenure.
My favorite comment of all time was the student who wrote "I thought this class was about witchcraft but it's actually about COMMUNISM." Oh, man, hilarious...the class was tangentially about the first and not at all about the second.
Everybody seems to be forgetting that there are wisenheimers who will write pure gibberish, vote the instructor down on a lark, fill out the bubbles so they look like a smiley face, and so on. I used to either leave the comments section blank or write gibberish sentences in my cruddy German or Spanish, possibly Soviet slogans in Cyrillic, or math equations that made no sense. Any college that actually judges faculty on what students write on some shitty form isn't worth its salt.
ReplyDeleteHey Mathsquatch:
ReplyDeleteI too had a Class from Hell. I called them that all term to other teachers, mostly so if any students overheard they wouldn't have any idea what section was being referred to.
After the final day where they all blew up at each other and declared eternal hate, entirely overreacted, and I had to soothe their "I'm sorry such and such student doesn't like you" nerves....
...I graded their final papers.
Two students were clearly A students and were getting B's. I was really angry, so I knew my grading of that final essay was off.
I figured out a curve.
The new class total?
666.
I can't make this stuff up.
We are now looking at our student evaluations since they will soon be online for the whole world to see. Our questions are the crappiest I've ever seen, and my idiot chairperson focuses only on the ones he thinks are relevant, such as
ReplyDelete--Would you take another course with this instructor? (How many students take that one literally and say, "No, I'm done with English"?)
--Did the instructor keep you informed of your progress and grades? (This is interpreted into Snowflake-ese as "Did the instructor send me daily updates on my average?" rather than did I grade their papers in a timely manner and show them how to compute their own averages.)
--Did the instructor treat you fairly? (I don't think I need to expound on that one for this crowd.)
Then he looks at the overall average for the course and the stupid comments. If the average is below 4 on a 1-5 scale, he gets concerned. If there are more than a couple of negative comments, he wants to talk about them and ask what we'd do differently. Meh.
Oh, and ours also has a section asking what the students think they are making in the course. Talk about a useless question! No one has ever made anything below a C in any class I've ever taught if the student evals are to be believed.
I once had a student evaluation that stated that I was sexist, as I didn't give equal time to letting female students talk in class. This was in a class where, no exaggeration, 100% of the class participation was from my female students - there wasn't one single peep from the male students all term long. Luckily I got this evaluation in my 2nd year of teaching, so I figured out early to put the summary documents from the evaluations in the recycling bin once I had received them. Also, one year I decided not to bother to hand out evaluations in class, to see what would happen with admin. Turns out, not much, as the staff member in charge of compiling all the evaluations from all the various courses in the department is a lazy ass.
ReplyDelete@My Little Proffie: I was working with a canned syllabus and assignments, though. Plus, the A students were some of the worst demons in that class. They go their As and I got to spend the next semester with pure angels.
ReplyDelete@EnglishDoc: TCFH got me in trouble with the MATH department because my results were below average. I don't know why they would think that anybody's averages could possibly be below the department average. I mean, there's nothing in math that explains how, for everybody with above average scores, there has to be somebody with below average scores, is there? I mean, it can't be anything about AVERAGES can it? Unless everybody scores exactly the average, there is not a chance in Hell (Teehee) that nobody will be below average. But, try explaining that to a group of pompous, blow-hard mathematicians. Yep, your snowflake students will all realize their own faults and actually try to learn in your class before that one happens. What a worthless school that was.
The administrative asswipes around here are determined to put the evaluations online for everyone to see, which might or might not be okay, but it is NOT okay when they insist that students evaluate things that students can't possibly evaluate.
ReplyDeleteStudents can evaluate questions like, was the professor on time, courteous, well-organized, and prepared for class? Did the professor show up for his/her office hours? Did the professor hand work back when he/she said he would? Did the grading for the class follow the syllabus?
Students cannot evaluate subjects like, was the professor well-informed in his/her subject? (All they know is whether you APPEAR to be well-informed.) And there is simply no point asking the question "how was the course, apart from the instructor?" which my administration insists should appear on all evaluation forms, because students cannot perform that separation.
So, I never read them. Now that they're being put up on the web I will not be looking at that website either.
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ReplyDeleteHow adults could possibly take the opinions of what quite clearly are petulant children seriously never fails to amaze me. We really ought to rise up and BAN the practice of anonymous evaluation of teachers by students: it has so obviously proven to be FAR more trouble than it could ever be worth.
ReplyDeleteBut student evals do generate data, and administrators do love their data...
Our evals drive me crazy because the scale is 1-5, with 1 being "strongly disagree" and 5 being "strongly agree." 2 and 4 are "disagree" and "agree," respectively. But guess what 3 is? "Not sure." So any student who actually admits that he or she is not qualified to rate the instructor (one of them is "This instructor has command of the material") is giving you the equivalent of a C. I'm not even a statistician or mathematician, and this scale makes me crazy. In what universe is "not sure" the midpoint of a scale measuring agreement or disagreement? I could even live with the heinous "neither agree nor disagree" (i.e., don't CARE) over this.
ReplyDeleteMathsquatch, Crazy Math Professor, and other friends, any insights?
I think that a rating out of five, with the middle option being not sure should be numbered -2, -1, 0, 1, 2. Then, the zeroes admit that the students cannot rate you and the negatives cancel any positives...
ReplyDeleteOn second thought, let's just do what Frod says and ban evals!
Mathsquatch out.
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ReplyDeleteStudent evals are yet another case, as described by Neil Postman in "Technopoly," of mathematics being used to describe things that simply cannot be quantified, or should be. Other phenomena like this are love, ethics, inspiration, morals, justice, beauty, aesthetics, or religion. Numbers simply cannot describe any of these things, and shouldn't be used to do so!
ReplyDeleteBefore you call me a "Luddite," I have just as much ability with, and respect for, numbers as you likely are. Indeed, I understand mathematics well enough to be able to see its limitations: one is never a master of using any tool unless one can easily think of ways to misuse that tool.
Even if numbers could be used here, scalars shouldn't be used to measure teaching effectiveness, anyway. It's much like using them to measure intelligence: the phenomenon is too complex to measure with one number.
And even if they COULD be, it assumes that student evaluations are objective, fair, objective, and rational. Come on, any adult ought to be able to see that they fail on all counts here.
P.S. Oops, I meant, "mature, fair, objective, and rational," all of which any adult for dang sure ought to acknowledge, they ain't.
ReplyDeleteFrod,
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you. I was not attempting to really come up with an alternate. We need to find a way to evaluate teachers at all levels that is not tied to student achievement. But, what can we do without infringing too much on the rights of the students, teachers, (and student-teachers or teacher-students, for that matter!)?
Mathsquatch out.
Mathsquatch:
ReplyDeleteI say peer review. Admittedly it's not perfect, but the problems with it pale in comparison with anonymous evaluation with no recourse possible by petulant children (students, I mean).