Student Evaluations

The New York Times Magazine was devoted to academia and teaching this week. There were many good articles in there, which should appeal to the academic-heavy readership at 11D. Let's first tackle the student evaluations article. (As I'm writing this post, I'm listening to this bloggingheads diavlog on student evals.)

Mark Oppenheimer reports that student evaluations are more important than ever. Faculty with bad student evaluations are being pushed out of universities. These evaluations are questionable. Students' judgment may be shaded by the difficulty level of the class or by fancy PowerPoint slides, rather than really rating the professor on how smart he/she was and how much they learned in class. "Professors are more ambivalent, and they happily share theories — some supported by research — that what students are really evaluating is less pedagogy than whether a professor is funny, handsome or, above all, an easy grader."

Are student evaluations an actuate measure of learning? Can they actually end up punishing good teachers who push the students to excel? Should schools care what the students think?

Whether these student evaluates are accurate or not, their weight is clearly being felt everywhere. Professors are now expected to please the masses and it's is a rather rude shock to many academics who haven't been trained to teach and, until now, have only been rewarded by peer reviewed publications.

So, how can professor improve their evals? I'm not sure, but these tips are the bare minimum:

Students like prepared professors. Don't deviate from the syllabus too much. Come to class with notes. Don't read from the notes, but have them to keep yourself on topic. Don't deviate from the textbook too much. The students don't want to feel like they've wasted their time reading material that you aren't covering in class. Don't change the dates of exams or quizzes. Return all exams within one week. Learn the students' names. Don't be too hard or too easy. Students don't respect the pushover professors. If you are hard, they will still respect you, if you help them out a lot. Students want to leave a class with the feeling that they've learned something and they want lots of notes - so write stuff on the board or have PowerPoint outlines. Learn how to talk from your diaphragm and project your voice, so nobody falls asleep. Try very hard to not reveal your political position. Be respectful of the students and listen carefully to their points. Take the time to dress nicely. The students want to feel that their professor is knowledgeable and is professional. Admit when you don't know something. Show up on time. You can't please all of the people all of the time, so don't try. 

A friend was telling me last week that some colleges may begin to offer tenure track jobs to teaching specialists and relieve them of the burden to publish. I liked that idea. Scholarship and teaching are two very different skills and not everybody is able to juggle both.

Gotta listen to the discussion on blogginghead about excessive specialization of academic research and the trend to vocation education schools. Two very different problems. 

Comments

[philosopherP]

I really doubt the causal connection between students learning the material and good class evaluations. This is especially true when the questions are generic enough to be applicable across classes and disciplines.

On the other hand, what they do reveal pretty quickly is how organized and respectful the professor is. I think the fastest way to make sure your evaluations are decent is to look at the class from the student's perspective. Being organized, on-time and doing what is planned on the syllabus shows respect for students -- and that will come across in at least minimally decent evaluation numbers.

I love the idea of splitting into teaching specialists -- if you see such a job for philosophy, let me know ;).

[jen]

This reminds me of ongoing concerns in the business world about what's called "360s". 360 degree reviews are an annual review process where the boss assesses each direct report's performance ... and the direct reports also assess the boss (typically privately, via HR interviews).

360s have the same pros and cons you mention about student evals. They can weed out unfair or unskilled managers; they stop problems before they're revealed via an exodus of staff. For example one of the first outcomes in a 360 cycle I saw was that managers who succeeded by requiring massive overtime from their teams were sanctioned.

However 360s in turn can make managing staff into a popularity contest, complete with all the idiocy of high school. Of the many consulting firms I've worked for, most of them abandon 360s (or refuse to truly use them) because they "hold the manager hostage". They often come into play when the layer that manages the managers is too hands-off for too long, and bad management practices are left go. So in a sense a call for 360s can be viewed as a sign of bad *upper* management.

Which makes me wonder ... is the higher ed insistence on student evals really all about the administration not taking the time to know what's happening in the classrooms? (End of snark.)

[RCinProv]

I'm in a department with a ceiling effect. Everyone does well on evaluations, so they don't really matter. Then again, it's not clear to me that they matter elsewhere in the uvneristy either. It's publish, publish, and publish. And that's before *and* after tenure. Would that anything about teaching actually count.

But come on, nothing about the professor fashion page?! A guy at my institution had actually his brooding picture taken in a perfectly hideous shirt. Ouch.

[laura]

That fashion show was a riot. Professor fashion is involves three steps. 1. Buy a pair of Dockers. 2. Roll it up in a ball until properly wrinkled. 3. Smear dry erase board marker along the butt. Ta-da! If you're a woman, add a necklace with very big beads for instant glam.

[Amy P]

Laura,

Here's step 2b:

Run through washer 30 times until wear spots appear, ideally over the rump.

Step 4: Wear until the rear seam begins to give.

One of my wifely chores is ensuring that steps 2b and 4 don't ever happen. For all of the academics and academic spouses out there, I have two words of advice for you: no-iron shirts. And one last thing: if an item is so worn-out that you can't in good conscience donate it anywhere, it probably should be reserved for yard work.

[harry b]

Read Valen Johnson's book Grade Inflation. It has a couple of chapters on evaluations, and all sorts of tips on how to get better ones. Unfortunately, these tips will not make you a better teacher, because evaluations don't measure that. One thing that people frequently do is give the students candy on the day of the evaluation. This has a significant effect. When I tell students this, they are shocked.

Basically, student evaluations are used by institutions because they are too lazy to do the managerial work of putting in proper quality control and quality information systems. Student evals look like they empower students. They don't.

[Wendy]

We have a dress code, so no major fashion disasters here. No rumpled Dockers or flip flops allowed. The first day of school is always a sad one for me because I have to wear pantyhose again, 4 days a week for the next 9 months.

[laura]

I've read some of those studies, Harry. I know about the chocolate trick, though I've never implemented it. I don't know. I actually find the open ended questions on the student evals very useful. It's really the only feedback that I get about what is working and what isn't.

I think that they do empower students. That's what the article says. People are losing jobs over the evals. It might be a huge miscarriage of justice, but students do have power.

I haven't been at that many universities, but I don't know about any other procedure for professors to get real feedback about their work. Even at the best places, you get observed by your peers rarely (if ever). Administrators just care if you pack the room or not. With the amount of work that I put into class prep, I do like to see that somebody appreciates it.

[harry b]

I, too, find the open ended questions genuinely useful. But that is because I have been in the classroom, and know what is going on. I also skew the open-ended questions by telling them, before they do the evaluations, that I want them to tell me in the open-ended questions what they found to be educationally valuable about the class, what they found not to be, and what they think I should do to improve the class in future iterations. (I also tell them that the numbers are very easy to manipulate). I tell them that I will read the open ended comments, and that no-one else will (which, now I have tenure, is true). But this is quite different from using them to evaluate someone else's performance, and especially, as in that article, from using them to make relative judgments (I only read the article after leaving the last comment, and there is some stuff in that case that we are not being told, I'm pretty sure -- and rightly so!). We should have continuing peer evaluations, perdiodically, right up to the date of retirement (most humanities departments here are very rigorous about visiting classes and writing evaluations pre-tenure, but not after). Anyway, no, they are not useless, they are just mostly useless for evaluating other people's teaching. (only mostly -- sometimes very bad things are happening that could only show up in those open-ended comments and very occasionally very good things are happening that show up there too).

[Emma Jane]

That evals article was what sucked me in... and I felt a little suckered afterwards. It wasn't fair, I thought, to try to have a general discussion of the validity and appropriate uses of evals, when the marquee examples were these weird pissed-off-jocks-getting-nice-ladies-fired situations.

One familiar issue was abuse via excessively close study and selective quotation. At my liberal arts college, for pre-tenure faculty, every word of every eval is read by the entire department -- and by the committee at the next level up. When those folks are from very different departments, they can pick out weird things to focus on. I can laugh now, but it wasn't funny when I got some of my official reviews a few years ago.

Hey! Unigo seems to be up! And... really slow and buggy. (Surprise!)

[Emma Jane]

P.S. Doughnuts work just as well as chocolate, and are perhaps more appropriate for classes at or before 10:00 a.m.