Comments on: Grade inflation works both ways: on professor evaluations

By: Lisa

Lisa — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 01:55:49 +0000

It seems that the words switch scale there, at ‘average’. The rest are absolute terms: this class was good, the teaching was poor, etc. The place between ‘good’ and ‘poor’ is ‘acceptable’, not ‘average’. It’s the same issue that has people talking past each other about grade inflation; is it a relative or an absolute scale?

For me, filling out evaluations, I would say 4/5 means I’m glad I took the class (but it wasn’t life-changing), and 3/5 means I at least didn’t suffer from it but would have been at least as happy in any other decent class. ‘Average’ here is distinctly not a compliment.

(I realize this is almost a week after posting, but it’s my first visit back here after your vacation)

By: Paul Gowder

Paul Gowder — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 02:24:10 +0000

I have my own suspicions about this, and they relate to mandatory evaluation. The more colleges make students write evaluations, the more students who don’t care fill them out, and then it’s all just noise. Fairly easy to test empirically…

By: Paris

Paris — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:43:12 +0000

I too just got my evaluations from last semester and was not surprised to discover that my students failed me (our evaluations use ‘very poor’, but given the context, I like fail as the bottom option). It was my first semester teaching at this institution and I agree with the students that it went badly, but on reflection (& discussion with others) I suspect that in reality I was probably just average. For all our American enthusiasm for equity, we hate average.

Among the vitriol in the written comments, there are some useful suggestions but so far the majority of these propose that I do exactly the things that I and my teaching mentors identified as ways to improve the course. This makes me deeply suspicious of the value of student evaluations for anything other than a pedagogical strategy of inclusiveness. The students get more out of the impression that their opinion matters than the instructors get out of the opinions provided.

Or maybe this is why some create their own evaluations in addition to the institutional ones - perhaps an issue of survey design?

By: Hugo Schwyzer

Hugo Schwyzer — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:09:04 +0000

Nels, that’s possible — but no one in my department received anything less than 50% outstanding. (And some of us never go to these pedagogy workshops to listen to the imploring voices of the Ed.D. crowd). Still you may be right….

By: Nels

Nels — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:06:25 +0000

Umm, maybe we are getting better? Ten years ago, I don’t remember seeing half the teaching workshops and pedagogy meetings I see today. It seems like, in the past few years, so many faculty members, at least where I’ve been, are really working hard to become better teachers. We’re writing about it on blog. We’re giong to more conferences and meetings. A lot of us are really trying.

I’ve seen professors lose out on tenure solely because of what the teaching evaluations say. Maybe it’s just here, but students know they count. Students know they are read. And they use them to be heard. And they are.

In my little world, at least.

By: Antigone

Antigone — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:43:26 +0000

For my part, I always seem extremely hesitant to give professors poor marks. Maybe it’s partly because I was taught that “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”, maybe it’s because I respect that it takes a lot of work to just get up in front of students day after day, but I don’t like hitting “average”.

In a few cases, there hasn’t really been a good way to critize a professor. I couldn’t very well write “was hard to hear because he had the exact same pitch and volume as the air conditioner” on an evalution.

By: Daisy Bond

Daisy Bond — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:52:42 +0000

I’ve always disliked the notion of balanced grading curves, either for students or for their teachers. In an ideal world, every single student in a class would be engaged, motived, and performing very well — i.e., all getting good grades. It’s extremely rare that this actually happens, of course, but it should be the ideal, and for professors as well. If this survey is indicative (which might be impossible to know), rejoice!

By: Tam

Tam — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:51:11 +0000

I usually give my professors high ratings overall, but in the part where we get to break down specifics - organized, contributed to the course, listened to questions, etc. - I am sure to distinguish areas where the professor is good from those where they need improvement.

By: Stentor

Stentor — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:04:38 +0000

I was really annoyed when I went to JiffyLube and the manager told me that if headquarters called me for a customer satisfaction survey, I should give them an “excellent” rating. Then friend told me they were probably like the place she works (a pharmacy), which uses the system Hypatia mentions — they only count the top ratings. It makes me think that in addition to driver’s licenses and gun licenses, we should have statistics licenses.

By: Hypatia

Hypatia — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:48:35 +0000

To further expand the opinions above: I’m a graduate student myself, and I’m of two minds about professors’ evaluations. On the one hand, I want to give them an honest idea what I thought of their teaching — even as a TA, I can see that it’s awfully hard to teach when you don’t know what effect you’re having on your students or why.

On the other hand, I know that student evaluations, like any consumer evaluations, can be used in bizarre and not always fair ways when it comes time for raises, promotions, and so on. For example, my dad, who’s a doctor, gets some kind of performance bonus if he gets more “Outstanding” ratings than the other doctors in his office — but getting “Very Good” from every single patient is worth less, in this contest, than getting “Outstanding” from one patient and “Totally Sucks” from all the rest.

So, between that and simple politeness (surprisingly hard to get past!), I find myself very rarely going below “Very Good,” and essentially never below “Acceptable”, on my evaluation forms. I do try to restrict “Outstanding” to those teachers I really think were well above average, but I doubt I’m keeping my curve very well balanced.