Learning to Please the “Customer”: The Trials and Tribulations of Student Evaluations

via AlterNet:



Posted by Chauncey DeVega at 5:13 pm
June 26, 2010

Learning to Please the “Customer”: The Trials and Tribulations of Student Evaluations


Student evaluations of their teachers are now a fixture in higher education. As colleges and universities have gone to a more customer serviced based model, where pleasing students (and their parents whom pay the bills) is now the ultimate goal, student evaluations have only received more emphasis. In a time of constrained budgets, happy students equal happy parents, who in turn pay what are often extravagantly high tuition rates.

For those on the other side of the desk, the end of the school year is a time for no small amount of anxiety. Did I do well on the evaluations? How will the university rank my performance? How will students’ opinions of my teaching impact a promotion, tenure, or salary decision?

As has been frequently discussed, student evaluations are based on a set of contentious premises. Primarily, do students really have the ability to fairly and critically evaluate their teacher. Certainly, a given student can assess the capacity to which they learned the material. But, is a given student in a position to really assess how well said material was presented to them and the pedagogical gifts (or not) of their instructor?

Moreover, in an era of rampant grade inflation and a culture where many “Millennials” (a group less affectionately described as the “trophy kids”) expect an “A” for merely showing up, a student’s assessment of a class or a teacher is often a function of an expected grade. Given that student evaluations are anonymous and online, the anger a student may feel about a grade (and towards a particular teacher) is doubly amplified and unfiltered by a generation raised on social networking sites and the pseudo-anonymity of the Internet. Thus, online student evaluations encourage meanness–not reasoned reflection and/or consideration. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/06/26/learning-to-please-the-customer-the-trials-and-tribulations-of-student-evaluations/

but what they taught me stuck with me, whether I agreed with them or not. And a few other professors whose classes I aced and I thought they were a lot of fun but, for the life of me, I cannot remember one challenging or profound thing that I learned.

You can know exactly what kind of teacher they were by reading all the evaluations. One or two disgruntled students don't mean the teacher was not effective if the rest of the 40 evaluations are positive. And most college students will make very good suggestions and fair critiques. Most of the professors would actually seek out their students' evaluations.

(and I have only had one), I always give them the highest ratings.
If I learned something and wasn't miserable--then it was a successful transaction for both of us.
I hope that my high marks cancel out bad marks.

Student evaluations, in many cases, are the ONLY evaluations adjuncts receive. It isn't just a raise or promotion adjuncts worry about ... it's whether they'll get any precious credit hours next semester. So many of the adjuncts who work with me at my institution are up front about how they "grade easy" to "avoid problems."

Some students take the job seriously and provide excellent feedback ... others whine about "too much work," "too hard a grader," or "made me come to class."

were our customers, and that we were to please them and their parents. We were at their service.

That was not long before I retired.

professors when I was a student. I tended to choose the profs described as tough and difficult and was never sorry. One tends to learn more from demanding profs than the wishy-washy kind.

In my experience, giving students honest grades on the 1st few assignments, then inflating their grades for the rest of the semester and telling them how much better they are than other classes convinces them that you are "tough" and that they are very smart. This is what gives you good evaluations.

Studies have shown that attractive teachers (especially men) get higher evaluations than unattractive ones.

As far as I know, no one has yet correlated outside measures of student improvement or knowledge with evaluations.

I read one study that concluded that high evaluations correlated most closely with students "receiving the grade they expected." I've known a few instructors who actually asked students on a questionnaire the first day of class what grade they expected.

It ain't gonna work.

But that is how one gets good evaluations from the average 18 year old.

Okay, I'll explain a little more. As the article says, evaluations are no longer being used to spot overall trends or look for suggestions for improvement.

Clearly, a professor who consistently scores in the bottom of the numerical range, and has repeated, similar, specific complaints (she takes 6 weeks to return papers; he falls asleep in class; etc) needs to consider finding a new profession.

But they are used as an absolute scale in many places. So an instructor who gets, say, a 7.1 on a 9 pt scale is considered objectively "worse" than an instructor who gets a 7.9. The difference between the 2 scores, in my experience, may be that Dr. 7.1 gives more homework, or is short and bald as opposed to tall and good-looking. Raises and appointments are actually determined based on these absolute scores.

That's pretty brazen. Sounds like Jane Smiley's "Moo." We don't talk about students as customers, but certainly there's a lot of emphasis on evals for probationary faculty. If you publish and get good evals, you'll get tenure. If you don't, you won't. Of course, post tenure, evaluations hardly mean anything, so it all works out, kind of. And my guess is that tenure in public higher ed is likely to go extinct in the next decade or so, as the drumbeat of constant, relentless accountability for teachers extends beyond the public schools and into the university systems. They want our pensions, too. Thank God we're unionized, but I'm not sure even that will help--hasn't done much for the public school teachers lately.

Not the result of the merits of one's knowledge.

of higher ed by the states--at least at public universities. We now see higher ed as a private good, not as a public good--so the lion's share of the expense falls on the student rather than the taxpayer. Big mistake in a world in which most other developed countries offer free, universal higher ed.