From Inside Higher Ed today:
Students Found to Lie on Course Evaluations
A new study of students at the University of Northern Iowa and Southeastern Oklahoma University has found that about one-third of students said that they had been untruthful on faculty evaluations they submit at the end of courses, The Des Moines Register reported. While students admitted to fudging the truth both to bolster professors they liked and to bring down those they disliked, the latter kind of fabrication was more common.
Here's the full story from the Des Moines Register.
Here's a link to the Inside Higher Ed story. It has a few decent comments.
So next week I'll get to find out if the lies will help me or hurt me.
I can't say as I've ever seen a student "lie" on one of my evaluations. They feel ill-served and they say so, and they make criticisms (perhaps unfair from my perspective), but they don't usually lie.
ReplyDeleteI just read my fall 2010 evals...pretty good, but got blasted by one very angry student who said I was a know-it-all and that I cussed in class. This is sort of a fair cop, so I don't begrudge her, even though it was a bad evaluation.
I have found that for the most part students really don't know how to write truly damaging comments. (Thank God.) They write about how they don't like the teacher, or the teacher isn't "fair". They write about the teacher's appearance. They write ungrammatical, misspelled prose.
Rarely do they write the kind of things that could do serious damage, true or not. "The professor was never prepared for class." "The professor canceled class at least a third of the time." "The professor was never once found in her office when I went to speak to her during her posted office hours." "The professor smelled of alcohol." "The professor made salacious comments to me in her office." "The professor stood over us as we wrote the evaluations, and told us what to say." "The professor didn't adhere to the syllabus, and we never got to half the material." "The professor did not grade any of our work until the week before finals."
Several students working together could really torch a prof, or at least spur an uncomfortable "inquest."
I think students should be given evaluations coded to them specifically, and supervised while they complete them, but that the names should only be made transparent to the chair. The prof would never see the names, only the comments. But the comments would be traceable.
But traceable comments would mean that persons like myself, who understand the basics of detection, could track these clowns down and drag them kicking and screaming into the sub-basement for "questioning." Nothing drastic, just the standard KGB interview.*
ReplyDeleteBetter to have the students do evaluations by Scantron.
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* According to Solzhenitsyn, such inteviews could last days and involve mind games Michael Haneke would be proud of.
It's not been my experience that they lie at all. They exaggerate, of course, but I've never seen a student comment that didn't have a basis in the reality of my teaching.
ReplyDeleteI, too, would say that I've seen exaggerations more than lies -- negative comments, especially, tend toward the sort of "she always"/"she never" statements that therapists and self-help books warn against, because they're both unproductive and pretty typical of human beings under stress. Unfortunately, chairs, review committees, etc. aren't always as sophisticated as your average self-help author or counselor in evaluating the factual vs. emotional content of such statements.
ReplyDeleteThere's also another category of statements that aren't exactly lies, because they reflect the student's reality, but are nevertheless not reflective of whether the professor is approaching his/her job in a responsible way: "It's the end of the semester and I have no idea of my grade" implies that the professor is somehow negligent, but may, instead, reflect the student's failure to take advantage of information available to him/her: grade breakdowns on the syllabus, grades on returned assignments, etc. "She took 4 weeks to grade my paper" will probably not be accompanied by an explanation that said paper was a week late, and the syllabus says that delayed grading is a possible consequence of handing work in late. Or "she's never in her office" may reflect the student's assumption that professors should be in their offices whenever the student feels the need for help (regardless of class schedules, posted office hours, etc.) rather than a failure to be present during office hours.
I think a lot of the problems stem from students comparing the class as taught (to the extent they even notice how the class was taught) to their personal platonic ideal of the class, rather than comparing the class as taught to the class as described in the syllabus, catalog description, etc. Most of us do a pretty good job of delivering the latter, but there's no way we can match each student's platonic ideal, even if it were a good idea for us to do so.
I have had students lie outright and outrageously about me. One girl whom I told repeatedly to stop accessing Facebook in class and to whom I ultimately awarded a very generous D suggested I was a psycho who was going to come to class and shoot everyone (I identified her by her distinctive handwriting). Fortunately, as the result of some previous prof's litigation, the written portion of our evals are read by no one but the professor being evaluated.
ReplyDelete