The results of the Fall Semester student evaluations should be in mailboxes any day now. Before opening them and starting the Spring Semester in a funk make sure to apply a healthy grain of salt.
In a study released by a University of Northern Iowa professor in early December, one-third of students surveyed admit that they stretch the truth in evaluations, including lying on the comments section (20%). As hard as it might be to believe, most often they do so to punish professor's they don't like.
The evaluation literature is replete with studies that show factors that have nothing to do with education play a significant role in student's evaluations, yet universities continue to place weight on this flawed tool in assessing faculty.
One of my colleagues from a private institution reported that his school sent a memo to faculty before final exams indicating that students would not be allowed to file the online evaluations for classes until after faculty had submitted grades. No doubt, if asked they will swear that there is no connection between student evaluations and grades.
I am not saying that we should not have student evaluations, just that we should recognize that they poorly measure faculty competence. In my own case I have found some very useful comments in evaluations. I also find comments stating how unfair it is that I don't give practice exams that contain all the questions likely to be on the exam, that even though the front row is empty students hiding in the back can't read the board well enough, etc.
If are not yet a tenured full professor print a copy of the UNI study and send a copy anonymously to your Provost or Academic VP.
T.S. Hall
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Though American students rank low on international exams, they rank highest among students with self-confidence.
ReplyDeleteStudents seem to use evaluations to assess their self-confidence at the end of a class. If it's lower, the instructor gets punished in the eval.
This creates a dilemma:
Let's say an instructor is very challenging and the students take the ACS Organic exam. The students perform better than many other sections. We know this because everyone took the same exam, so the measurement is more objective than tailored exams most profs give. But the pupils don't have warm feelings for the pushy instructor. Poor evaluations ensue, though students never consider that the teaching style had a positive outcome despite the means.
If the instructor doesn't get some credit for that style of teaching, then they have only poor evaluations to show for their work. It then becomes tempting to stroke students' esteem, grade on a curve and let students not learn much in order to keep evaluations more favorable.
This problem becomes even worse for TA's. If there are three discussion/lab sections, what incentives are there for the TA's to teach better if doing so would yield poor evaluations? It would be better to post average test scores for each section in public view so that the value of each teaching style can be measured more objectively. Instead of students using their subjective feelings to evaluate their instructor. At least the students would be able to focus more on the outcome than how they feel at the moment.