Last year, after 16 years of teaching of University teaching, I took my first sabbatical from teaching. For the first time, I had research responsibilities, but theoretically nothing else. At the end of my sabbatical year when my department circulates the annual student comments written on the back of the teaching evaluation forms, and even though I hadn’t taught a class during the past year, I got a negative teaching evaluation. It seems that some student took a class during the spring semester and thought I was the professor. On the back of the evaluation, written very boldly, it said “Professor [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE] SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!” You can insert anyone’s name here. In this case, it was my name. I didn’t teach the course. I was excused from teaching for the year. Nevertheless, official records indicate that I have a negative teaching evaluation. Will wonders never cease.
I refer to this example because it illustrates one of the reasons we shouldn’t rely on student evaluations of professors. It seems that a number of them don’t even know who is teaching the course. For example, when I get to the end of the year, and the students are handed a teaching evaluation, one of them inevitably says “Excuse me. Do we have to fill out all this information on the top, like the course title and number, and the professor’s name? If we do, could you please write those on the board?” How useful are evaluations from students when some of them, perhaps the ones who provide the worst reviews, don’t even know who is teaching the class?
And, in what world would you let an apprentice evaluate the skill of his/her master? You might ask the apprentice if they liked working for the master craftsperson, what aspects of the training they enjoyed or didn’t enjoy, but you would hardly ask them if the master craftsperson was a “master” of their skills. No, to make that determination, you would ask other craftspersons. But, here I am, a college professor with 22 years of teaching experience, a BS, 2 MAs, and a Ph.D., and more than 110 publications, and my skill at teaching and my knowledge of my field is judged by someone who has no credentials or expertise.
Furthermore, these evaluations may have been provided by people who not only don’t do well in an educational setting; they may be provided by people I have, for example, caught cheating in my course. Why should someone who has failed my course for cheating be allowed to evaluate me?
I didnt understand this post. He rote it to cnfuse me. I never wurked so hard 4 a proffesor. and this one just didnt make since. i pay his fukin salarie and he makes us reed stuff like this that dont make since. Hes the most arogant proffesor in the hole universitie. I was the best reader in my highschool and now he tries to make me feel like i cant read. No fair!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteThe Dean's daughter took my big introductory class in the first semester. She hated it. The Associate Dean's son took my class in the second semester. He hated it. My Chair was told to "get a full Professor to teach the class" My beef? I was away on sabbatical the entire year that the Deans' daughter and Assoc Dean's son took the introductory class- so it was taught by others in the dept that year. Did my Chair explain this to protect my reputation? No, he merely put a professor in charge of me as asked. It took years to overcome that stigma in the Dean/Assoc Dean's eyes. Grrrrhhhh.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteYour higher-ups are jagoffs. I've had similar ones. It gave me the feeling that the lunatics had taken over the asylum.
DeleteAnonymous student evaluations of teaching are a bad idea from the 1960s, when kids almost took over the world. Can you imagine the effect that doing this would have on an army, or on a sports team? Any department Chair who took this evaluation for someone who wasn't even teaching was a fool, not that it stops some of them.
ReplyDeleteI shall now make an announcement:
I have tenure, and I will use it effectively. I therefore SWEAR, as all that is holy is my witness, that I will from this day forward NEVER read another anonymous student evaluation of my teaching EVER again, for the rest of my life, unless I am directly ordered to do so in the direct supervision of a superior. And I will do so at the-site-that-will-not-be-named only to the extent that I need in order to send them e-mail to say "This is libelous," which I find can be effective in having them removed. If I found graffiti about me on the wall of the bathroom, I'd remove it, too: I see no point in leaving it there.
Amen. (I'm picturing you silhouetted, fist raised, against the sky, -- or is that Scarlett O'Hara? Or Bubba? No, Bubba would be on a horse.) The question is what the 75% of us (current New Faculty Majority estimate) who aren't on the tenure track can do about the problem. From that perspective, the key issue is not whether you, as a chair, can avoid reading your own evaluations, but whether you can avoid reading, or otherwise making use of, the evaluations of those you supervise. I'd guess that would be somewhere between difficult and impossible.
DeleteHi CC! You know, I know I am safe from RYP in terms of my current job. I have tenure and a secure position in the college.
DeleteBUT, I am seriously disillusioned with my lot in life. I just don't know how much longer I can do this. And I worry that some person at some prospective job in the private sector, someone who knows even less than a ridiculously stupid academic silverback type, how completely vicious and untrue a lot of the stuff on there is...I worry someone like that might think that the RYP stuff is a real reflection of my work ethic or something....I'm not even sure what. I think you have a point, is what I am saying, Cassandra.
I just cannot bring myself to go there. For some reason, that stuff really gets me.
Hope you are having a great night!
Bella
CC: It's not a raised fist, it's middle finger.
DeleteAs Chair, I still do go through the motions of student evaluations, since it's required by the university, but my department does all of our actual faculty evaluation by peer review. Since we're a small, collegial department, and also since my faculty know I'd be most annoyed if they abused peer review in the way described in Merely Academic's thread of January 25, "the 'difficult colleague'" (and they know I wouldn't hesitate to use the remedy I recommended to Merely on the thread, if needed), I think we do pretty well.
Love the graphic. Question 78 sums it up nicely....
ReplyDeleteGiven what we know about the erosive effect of anonymity on social civility (see "internet"), I'm ever astonished that we attach so much weight to anonymous student evaluations. Talking to friends of mine who work on the tech side, we could link the comments to the students' final grades, giving some context for the comments.
ReplyDeleteBTW, amongst last term's anonymous comments, one student complained that I smoke (true), drink alcohol (also true), and actually discussed underwear in class. Grounds for firing, according to the complainant!
I will not read the site that must not be named. I won't do it. I used to do it----I used to go on and respond to the bullshit like I was a student, when they said something completly untrue (like another person here has admitted to doing). I used to contact them to tell them something was libelous and get it removed (yes, that does work). But I just won't do it anymore. Reading that site makes me feel physically ill----and I am a good prof. I know I am. I have lots and lots of repeat students----more than anyone in my department. I try to grow and change in response to feedback I get in legitmate ways from my students. I care about my students; I try very hard to succeed at my job. But THAT SITE. Oh, the pain. I could not bear it. Even the "good" comments were mostly so poorly written. And the lies, and insults, and libelous nonsense. If it is true, what Contingent Cassandra wrote elsewhere on this stie, that it is a good idea to monitor RYP, then I guess I am screwed. But I have been a happier person, these past two years, since I gave up that horrible, horrible site for good. Nothing could make me go back and look at it.
ReplyDelete@Bella: I'd say that if you're in a position to safely ignore it (i.e. on the tenure track in a position where you know you'll truly be evaluated on your research, service, and/or teaching as measured by in-house methods), then by all means ignore it. I don't know whether I'm right that monitoring it is useful, or necessary. At this point in my own career, it just feels like something I need to do, just in case.
DeleteP.S. Thanks to you and Frod for the "libelous" tactic. I'll have to keep that in mind.
Given what we know about the erosive effect of anonymity on social civility (see "internet"), I'm ever astonished that we attach so much weight to anonymous student evaluations. Talking to friends of mine who work on the tech side, we could link the comments to the students' final grades, giving some context for the comments.
ReplyDeleteBTW, amongst last term's anonymous comments, one student complained that I smoke (true), drink alcohol (also true), and actually discussed underwear in class. Grounds for firing, according to the complainant!
Universities lie when they say that evaluations (anonymous student, non-anonymous student, or peer) are the "only" portable method we have of evaluating the oh-so subjective matter of teacher effectiveness.
ReplyDeleteA few years ago, my department launched an initiative to assess the quality of the writing program. They collected random samples of student writing from the beginning of the semester and compared them to random samples from the end of the semester. The entire thing took some effort and time and money, but it helped to pinpoint the program's strengths and weaknesses.
This approach isn't without problems, of course--you might randomly select the student who doesn't care enough to improve his writing, or the student who is brilliant and doesn't need a writing class--but on the whole, this approach makes more sense than "tell us what you liked about the professor!" or "was the class interesting to you?"
My department has done some exercises of this kind, and will be doing more (as will we all; assessment is definitely the coming thing, whether we like it or not, and this is one of the more bearable, legitimate ways of evaluating college-level work). It strikes me as a good way to evaluate the program as a whole, but I'd be hesitant to use it as a means of evaluating individual teachers, at least not without using an impracticably large sample. As we all know, individual sections -- and the students within a section -- vary widely. And at least at my institution, there's a real likelihood that the least-senior, most marginalized faculty (i.e. recently-hired adjuncts) and some of the hardest-to-teach students (e.g. recent transfers, those returning after one or another sort of involuntary leave, the generally disorganized, depressed, etc.) will meet in sections scheduled at the least popular times of day. That points to a key problem: as I heard a high school teacher say on NPR today, you can't teach a student who isn't there (or who is convinced that (s)he can pass while barely attending, and/or spending little to no time on homework).
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't mind being judged by my students' success on an exit test, as long as they, too, had something (e.g. graduation, or at least passing the class) at stake; in fact, I think a situation in which the teacher and students work together to prepare the students for a high-stakes exam scored by a third party (and/or a group of teachers) is a pretty good model for success. But the students, as well as the teacher, need to have a strong incentive to succeed on the task -- and the task needs to be a valid measure of a genuinely useful skill.