Comments on: The Productive, the Constructive, the Bizarre: Adventures in Student Evaluations

By: Jason Mittell

Jason Mittell — Tue, 24 May 2011 16:38:48 +0000

The best advice that I was told as a junior faculty member – and that I pass along to my junior colleagues – is that when you read your own evaluations, you’ll probably focus on the outliers, but when others read them, they’ll look for the patterns. I know that I’ll latch onto the few scathing comments in an otherwise strong bunch of evals to feed my own neuroses, or perhaps the singular superlative to bolster my spirits. But review committees & senior colleagues are looking for the trends & repetitions, for the instructive insight that they can provide in the aggregate. When I’m able to heed this advice in reading my own evals (and now those of my junior colleagues), it becomes a much more constructive and calm process than trying to parse out who might have said that horrible thing about me.

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Sun, 22 May 2011 15:24:11 +0000

Although I haven’t had any particularly hysterical evaluations for my own classes, I once T.A.’d a course where a solid fraction of the 130 evaluations (maybe 20 percent?) took the time to criticize the female professor’s clothing – it was a class she team taught with male colleagues. The experience did not incline me to take evaluations terribly seriously, although I have occasionally been given some extremely useful feedback about new teaching techniques I’ve tried when I wasn’t sure if they’d succeeded or failed.

By: Jonathan Gray

Jonathan Gray — Sun, 22 May 2011 14:30:05 +0000

Midterm evals with pointed questions of use to yourself, not the generic questions allotted by your dept or university, can sometimes be a smart idea. They allow you as instructor either to adapt accordingly or to address why you’re not adapting. For instance, I used them when teaching a 250 person lecture, and one of my questions was whether I was using too many clips, too few, or about enough. Something like 90 people felt I was using too many, about 90 felt there weren’t enough, and the rest felt it was about right. Quoting those numbers back to the students was helpful I think in letting them see that a lot came down to personal preference. Strategically, too, they can take the sting out of final evals, as students get an earlier chance to vent when it’s just you reading them, rather than let it get pent up and get directed into the evals that your dept will read.

Another tip is to give a small bit of background on how these get used in your dept and why and how they matter. Apart from anything else, most students have no clue whatsoever how ranks work (as evident by those funny evals that demand that a TA be given tenure), and so I think it’s important to let them know how advancement works in a university, and where evals fit into that. But quite simply, when they know, they can be better at writing helpful evals. That can lead into a brief framing of appropriate tone (ie: letting them know that slang and profanities will likely mean their opinion is ignored by whoever reads them, as will comments on my appearance or fashion sense, and encouraging them to be professional).

My fun example for the above that I usually share with students is a comment I got when I taught an Intro to Composition class. I needed to teach good strategies for introducing an essay one day, then for concluding the next day, and I chose a constant topic for those hypothetical essays so that we could walk through a whole bunch of strategies without getting lost in the content. That topic was gun control. Later on, one of my final evals from the class clown (I know it was him), said “fantastic prof, but enough with the guns already.” Needless to say, that didn’t impress my current dept!