Author Topic: Teachers/Professors: How Important are Student Evaluations?  (Read 4565 times)

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Re: Teachers/Professors: How Important are Student Evaluations?
« Reply #15 on: February 11, 2016, 02:14:57 PM »

Offline kozlodoev

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My experience has always been that teacher evaluations were meant to be anonymous and that teachers weren't supposed to see them.

Is that not the case where you teach, Potter?

Seems odd.

I heard the same exact thing. At my old community college, one of the professors who gave me a good letter of recommendation asked me not to worry about evaluations. Rarely does it ever really hinder or become a nuisance unless the classes continuously seem to fail expectations or students give terrible ratings. But it has to be on a large scale from what I heard. (Professor was also not supposed to disclose this information to me, but she didn't seem like she cared that about losing her job, since she was an excellent professor who engaged her students, and consistently had excellent academic results.)
Evaluations ARE anonymous, but of course you're able to see them. In fact, you usually get the whole stack of papers (after the semester concludes). They're feedback. Not being able to see in what area your students find you deficient defeats the purpose.

It varies by school, but I've always gotten at least a summary report. If you can make handwriting and have a sufficiently small class, you should be able to tell who gave you a certain piece of (handwritten) feedback.
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Re: Teachers/Professors: How Important are Student Evaluations?
« Reply #16 on: February 11, 2016, 02:25:31 PM »

Offline Celtics18

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My experience has always been that teacher evaluations were meant to be anonymous and that teachers weren't supposed to see them.

Is that not the case where you teach, Potter?

Seems odd.

We see them, but they are supposed to be anonymous.  Sometimes you can pretty easily figure out who wrote them, though.




Shady.  Students are told to give honest feedback, then they are placed on those sealed Manila envelopes to give the illusion of anonymity, but you are confirming that--as every student has always expected--the professors get to see those evaluations anyway.

This has of course always seemed like the main reason (along with laziness--and maybe a bit of loyalty, "code of the playground" thinking) that very few students give honest or in-depth feedback on those things.

If I were a college professor and a student actually took the energy to write a negative rant on one of those Evals, I would hope that I would seriously consider the possibility that there was something in my teaching that I could work on improving.

Hopefully you learn something from this experience that informs your teaching going forward and helps you to clarify your goals as a teacher.

Good luck.  Remember, you are teaching for the students.

Why would you think the professors don't see them?  The point is to give the professors feedback and it's not like administrators are itching to spend time communicating what's in them in a completely rephrased way to every professor for every section.  Administrators and dept. chairs rarely even talk to you about them unless there's an unusual negative trend present.  Anonymous just means your name's not on it, not that the professor never sees it.

But how the evals are delivered actually depends on the school - at schools with paper evals we got copies of the individual forms and a summary sheet.  At my current school with only online evals we get aggregated results on the numerical ratings but every written comment is pulled out and provided to us under the corresponding prompt.  So it's not like handwriting can be recognized any more, but in writing-heavy classes you get a very good feel for how some individuals write.  And the bad writers tend to have more distinctive "styles" than the good and average ones.  Or they will cite a specific situation or interaction that only applies to them.

Like I said earlier if you're hearing the same criticism repeatedly there might be something to it, provided it's not something like "too high of a standard" which I consider a positive.  And there's always room for improvement somewhere whether the students are able to ID it or not.  But the kind of situation jpotter's describing is much more likely a problem student who doesn't like being challenged on subjective material or corrected on objective stuff.

Well, obviously Potter saw the negative one written about him and knew who the student was.  Maybe in Potter's case, he simply deduced which student gave a negative review, but I don't like the idea that the teacher gets to see it. 

It seems like it could be harmful to the student.  If there isn't some assurance of anonymity for the student, these evaluations seem like a complete sham. 

They are basically saying; "don't be honest, particularly if there are going to be negative observations.  Giving negative feedback could absolutely have negative repercussions for you, the student."
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Re: Teachers/Professors: How Important are Student Evaluations?
« Reply #17 on: February 11, 2016, 02:26:31 PM »

Offline sofutomygaha

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I've never not read my student evals. They are anonymous, but handwritten and I've graded everyone's tests. For what it's worth, I only recognize handwriting on the eval if it's one of my absolute favorite students or if it's someone I've had to put a lot of extra work in with, for whatever reason. Also, that negative thing student X said is something that other people have said and I'm definitely taking it to heart.

They are usually extremely gratifying to read, but they are mostly positive reinforcement for stuff that went well in the course. For the stuff that doesn't go well, well, usually the students don't have a specific idea why and they don't write much. Specific constructive criticism is rare.

Student Evals, in my experience, are so soft/nonspecific on criticism that they don't provide actionable evaluations of profs. The exception would be when specific comments pop up about unprofessional behavior. If a prof is acting in a sexist, bullying, or otherwise unprofessional way, the evals have a lot of power. As you can imagine, the dean can't have a situation where a prof with any hint of bad behavior in his/her evals is caught abusing students.

Otherwise, we mostly enjoy them and joke about them to one another. My wife is on a run of perfect 7s and everyone in the dept is jelly that she's the coolest.
« Last Edit: February 11, 2016, 02:33:43 PM by sofutomygaha »

Re: Teachers/Professors: How Important are Student Evaluations?
« Reply #18 on: February 11, 2016, 02:29:31 PM »

Offline sofutomygaha

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Re: Teachers/Professors: How Important are Student Evaluations?
« Reply #19 on: February 11, 2016, 02:42:34 PM »

Offline fairweatherfan

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Well, obviously Potter saw the negative one written about him and knew who the student was.  Maybe in Potter's case, he simply deduced which student gave a negative review, but I don't like the idea that the teacher gets to see it. 

It seems like it could be harmful to the student.  If there isn't some assurance of anonymity for the student, these evaluations seem like a complete sham. 

They are basically saying; "don't be honest, particularly if there are going to be negative observations.  Giving negative feedback could absolutely have negative repercussions for you, the student."

I think you're confusing "not perfect" with "complete sham", but more to the point, how do you think that level of anonymity can be attained?  Removing handwriting helps, and I'm for that, but if a student's citing specific instances like jpotter mentioned, there's not really any way to avoid IDing where it came from.  Or if their writing style is distinctive, of course someone familiar with it would register that.  It sounds like you'd require someone whose entire job is rephrasing evaluation comments while still managing to keep the meaning the students want to convey.  Or else strip out all the written feedback and turn everything into 1-5 ratings, which loses a lot of value. 

Either way, it's very unlikely a professor's going to have a vendetta against a student who writes a bad eval - the stakes are very low so it's not as if a bad eval is going to haunt a professor or harm his/her career (unless illegal/unethical stuff is being alleged).  The consequences of retribution against a negative eval are drastically higher than the consequences of the eval itself.  And at bigger schools you might well never see that student again.  I'm sure something crazy like that has happened somewhere but it's not a realistic concern when deciding whether to be honest - a bigger one would be that evals just don't carry much weight no matter what direction they fall in.

Re: Teachers/Professors: How Important are Student Evaluations?
« Reply #20 on: February 11, 2016, 02:55:53 PM »

Offline Celtics18

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Well, obviously Potter saw the negative one written about him and knew who the student was.  Maybe in Potter's case, he simply deduced which student gave a negative review, but I don't like the idea that the teacher gets to see it. 

It seems like it could be harmful to the student.  If there isn't some assurance of anonymity for the student, these evaluations seem like a complete sham. 

They are basically saying; "don't be honest, particularly if there are going to be negative observations.  Giving negative feedback could absolutely have negative repercussions for you, the student."

I think you're confusing "not perfect" with "complete sham", but more to the point, how do you think that level of anonymity can be attained?  Removing handwriting helps, and I'm for that, but if a student's citing specific instances like jpotter mentioned, there's not really any way to avoid IDing where it came from.  Or if their writing style is distinctive, of course someone familiar with it would register that.  It sounds like you'd require someone whose entire job is rephrasing evaluation comments while still managing to keep the meaning the students want to convey.  Or else strip out all the written feedback and turn everything into 1-5 ratings, which loses a lot of value. 

Either way, it's very unlikely a professor's going to have a vendetta against a student who writes a bad eval - the stakes are very low so it's not as if a bad eval is going to haunt a professor or harm his/her career (unless illegal/unethical stuff is being alleged).  The consequences of retribution against a negative eval are drastically higher than the consequences of the eval itself.  And at bigger schools you might well never see that student again.  I'm sure something crazy like that has happened somewhere but it's not a realistic concern when deciding whether to be honest - a bigger one would be that evals just don't carry much weight no matter what direction they fall in.

I'm sticking with "sham." 
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Re: Teachers/Professors: How Important are Student Evaluations?
« Reply #21 on: February 11, 2016, 03:12:15 PM »

Offline fairweatherfan

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Well, obviously Potter saw the negative one written about him and knew who the student was.  Maybe in Potter's case, he simply deduced which student gave a negative review, but I don't like the idea that the teacher gets to see it. 

It seems like it could be harmful to the student.  If there isn't some assurance of anonymity for the student, these evaluations seem like a complete sham. 

They are basically saying; "don't be honest, particularly if there are going to be negative observations.  Giving negative feedback could absolutely have negative repercussions for you, the student."

I think you're confusing "not perfect" with "complete sham", but more to the point, how do you think that level of anonymity can be attained?  Removing handwriting helps, and I'm for that, but if a student's citing specific instances like jpotter mentioned, there's not really any way to avoid IDing where it came from.  Or if their writing style is distinctive, of course someone familiar with it would register that.  It sounds like you'd require someone whose entire job is rephrasing evaluation comments while still managing to keep the meaning the students want to convey.  Or else strip out all the written feedback and turn everything into 1-5 ratings, which loses a lot of value. 

Either way, it's very unlikely a professor's going to have a vendetta against a student who writes a bad eval - the stakes are very low so it's not as if a bad eval is going to haunt a professor or harm his/her career (unless illegal/unethical stuff is being alleged).  The consequences of retribution against a negative eval are drastically higher than the consequences of the eval itself.  And at bigger schools you might well never see that student again.  I'm sure something crazy like that has happened somewhere but it's not a realistic concern when deciding whether to be honest - a bigger one would be that evals just don't carry much weight no matter what direction they fall in.

I'm sticking with "sham."

So, a sweeping, unrealistic criticism, then after multiple clarifications of the situation and a request for possible solutions, nothing but a dismissive restatement of the same half-baked complaint?  I think you're right, you should avoid evals.

Re: Teachers/Professors: How Important are Student Evaluations?
« Reply #22 on: February 11, 2016, 03:48:18 PM »

Offline Celtics18

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FWF,

That last comment was meant to be relatively tongue-in-cheek.

That said, while I rarely have found much use for the kinds of standardized "circle the appropriate box" types of evaluations that I've seen in my college career, I do think the circumstances where they could be useful is in the rare instances where the student writes critiques that are more detailed than the usual affair, whether positive or negative.

JPotter clearly had issues with the student he described in his initial post.  I think the best advice for him would be to actually give some serious reflection to the comments given by the student.

Are there things contained within the criticism that could help him be a better teacher moving forward?

I'm no expert, but I am convinced that taking the approach that the entire truth lies in the student giving the negative review being a "problem student" isn't likely to bode well for him becoming a better teacher.

Just my two cents.
 
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PG: G. Hill/D. Schroder
SG: C. Lee/B. Hield/T. Luwawu
SF:  Giannis/J. Lamb/M. Kuzminskas
PF:  E. Ilyasova/J. Jerebko/R. Christmas
C:    N. Vucevic/K. Olynyk/E. Davis/C. Jefferson

Re: Teachers/Professors: How Important are Student Evaluations?
« Reply #23 on: February 11, 2016, 04:10:00 PM »

Offline guava_wrench

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TPs all around. Thanks for the encouragement and advice, guys. It's nice to know that others deal with these problems and get through them, too.

Smitty, I'm teaching in the humanities, mainly ethics, logic, and critical writing/thinking. I'm hoping to develop some more courses in healthcare ethics (what my PhD is, or will be, in) and philosophy of religion in the near future. What do you guys teach?
Ethics, especially bioethics/healthcare ethics, can be tough as critically examining ethics will makes some people feel uncomfortable. Not surprising if a student claims personal attacks because they have a hard time facing their feelings. While there are good and bad approaches to handling such problems with fragile students, the students still need to justify arguments if they are going to learn how to think.

Re: Teachers/Professors: How Important are Student Evaluations?
« Reply #24 on: February 11, 2016, 04:12:07 PM »

Offline guava_wrench

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My experience has always been that teacher evaluations were meant to be anonymous and that teachers weren't supposed to see them.

Is that not the case where you teach, Potter?

Seems odd.
I heard the same exact thing. At my old community college, one of the professors who gave me a good letter of recommendation asked me not to worry about evaluations. Rarely does it ever really hinder or become a nuisance unless the classes continuously seem to fail expectations or students give terrible ratings. But it has to be on a large scale from what I heard. (Professor was also not supposed to disclose this information to me, but she didn't seem like she cared that about losing her job, since she was an excellent professor who engaged her students, and consistently had excellent academic results.)
Evaluations ARE anonymous, but of course you're able to see them. In fact, you usually get the whole stack of papers (after the semester concludes). They're feedback. Not being able to see in what area your students find you deficient defeats the purpose.

It varies by school, but I've always gotten at least a summary report. If you can make handwriting and have a sufficiently small class, you should be able to tell who gave you a certain piece of (handwritten) feedback.
They really need to be computerized. Silly that they are still handwritten.