I’d like to take on one of my least favorite subjects => student evaluations of teaching. I really do like my job (most of the time), and I’d like to keep it at least a little longer, but evals are making me crazy. Background: I’m a mid-career convert to the leisurely, no stress, well-paid life of the academic, after five years on active duty in the army and seventeen in industry with a Fortune 500 manufacturing firm.
So I went back to school at age 45. After graduating from Big State U. in my home state with a Ph.D. in basket weaving, I taught for several years at BSU, where student evals of my teaching were always in the top half, usually in the top third, and sometimes in the top fourth. I then spent two years at Smaller State U. on the East Coast with almost identical evals. I liked it there a lot, and they liked me and wanted me to stay, but family matters brought me back to my home state where I took a job with Small Church-Affiliated U.
At SCAU I teach the same general introductory survey, major, and capstone courses in basket weaving that I taught at BSU and SSU, but my student evals went completely in the tank. I don’t mean they fell below the mean; they fell into the bottom 10% across the board. I wasn’t doing anything different; in some cases I was using the same textbooks and notes that I had used in classes that I had, only two years earlier, scored in the top 25%.
It is, of course, possible that teaching standards here are that much higher. It’s also possible that student evals are totally meaningless. It is further possible that we just coddle the little darlin’s here too much. It’s even remotely possible that I’m not nearly as good as I think I am. But still . . . .
So here’s my question => What have your evals done as you moved from school to school? I’d like to think it’s not just me.
I think the cultures are so different from institution to institution, from department to department, that variance is the norm. One place I taught I was a huge softie. Another place, the hardest of the hardasses. Look around at your colleagues and you can probably guess why your evals are what they are.
ReplyDeleteWord gets around, especially for classes that are offered by a variety of proffies.
It might be the sort of students that lower-tier SLACs are attracting right now. Colleagues who have taught elsewhere tell me that their student evaluations at this particular church-related SLAC are the harshest they've had anywhere.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just you.
If your evaluations have dropped, you should look in the mirror and wonder why you are not helping your students as much as you once did.
ReplyDeleteStopping reading of this page would probably help your scores more than anything.
Oh dear. For the record, I am deeply suspicious of women who define themselves in terms of their spouse or children with online screen names. To me that says, I have spent so much energy on them, I have no idea who I am anymore. Trolling this page seems to confirm that suspicion in this case.
ReplyDeleteIf your evaluations have dropped, you should look in the mirror and wonder why you are not helping your students as much as you once did.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe you need to tell your undergrad to pick up a book, buckle down and do the damned homework.
I'm an undergrad's father. My undergrad tells me the same things about students that my peers are complaining about, right here on College Misery.
Tell your undergrad to grow the hell up. Just because it's not graded doesn't mean it's OK to skip it. Homework exists for a reason, and if you don't do the homework, you won't get anything out of the class that you paid a bundle for.
If students are working through the material and having problems that they can identify, I can help with that. But when I ask the equivalent of "who's buried in Grant's tomb?" and get nothing but blank stares, it burns my bacon. For God's sake, at least give me something to pat you on the back for, even if it's something a comatose third-grader should have been able to answer correctly.
Otherwise, I'll admit, class is going to be an unpleasant place to be. Tough shit, lady.
Perhaps the questions being asked differ, too. My evals went up at the SLAC where I teach when I moved b/c they were questions that relate to what I do well... let me explain: One question we have is: "Rate how well the professor sticks to the syllabus schedule." Since I'm a stickler about deadlines, I always get a high score on this, even if students don't LIKE the fact that I stick to deadlines. They'd like to rate me low on this, but can't, so this question helps my evals. I also get high scores on the one that says: "I was aware of academic honesty in this course" b/c I always mention when someone (I don't reveal WHO) has plagiarized or cheated and make sure that everyone realizes they will be held responsible for their choices in such situations. So again the QUESTION helps me along.
ReplyDeleteAlso, when moving from one environment to another, it takes time to adjust to the culture. Sometimes students are just pissed off that you aren't like the last professor they had and now they have to get used to a new person. What an inconvenience.
On my evals, I'll sometimes get a balance of "I LOVED the group activities" and "I HATED the group activities" from the SAME class. It's all personal preference for students and they're not really thinking about whether they've learned much. They're thinking about how ENTERTAINED they were and whether they're getting an A for doing very little work. Either way, the evals tell me nothing useful BECAUSE of feedback like that. So I pretty much ignore them.
@Undergrad mom: I'm sure you'd like to attend class FOR your kid. You'd probably be appalled by much of the behavior we see. Then again, maybe not; you're probably the reason they're trying to get an A for simply being your kid.
@introvert: Tell your friends at church-related SLACs to pray more at the beginning of class. That always helps to raise the evals (no idea why, but I have friends who have tried this; even a canned "Be with us as we learn today. Amen" seemed to do wonders for raising students' perceptions of their teaching when at a CHURCH-related SLAC.
ReplyDeleteI've found that if I use the language used in the evals to tell them what I'm doing, they'll rate me more highly than otherwise. For example, I'll say, "OK, now I'm taking time to focus on you as individuals and to help your growth as individuals by giving you this assignment." Since that's wording STRAIGHT from the evals, they go up b/c students recall that I did that in class (b/c I explicitly told them I was doing that; whether I was or not is irrelevant).