Student Evaluations of Teachers

[John Cole]

Guys, give me a little help, please.

This year I am on a faculty committee responsible for designing student evaluation forms. I have a few questions. First, how seriously do you take these forms? Do you use evaluations as revenge against teachers you don't like? Or give high marks to teachers you do like? Do you feel you are always capable of evaluating teachers and what they do? Do you rush through these just to get them done?

Do you use Rate My Professors? If so, are you more candid on this site than on evaluation forms?

Overall, would you prefer to answer more questions or fewer?

Thanks.

[XXXNoahXXX]

I had one professor who was tenured and he told us "im tenured. im not going anywhere. don't bother checking off boxes or anything, just put down some comments on how you think i could improve the course."

I liked this approach.


In general, other than at the extremes, only the comments end up being useful.

[yellowjack]

A ton of classmates incorrectly correlate the difficulty of the course with a professor's ability to teach, clarity in speaking, helpfulness, responsiveness to questions, etc. The comments should have the most weight, but I'll bet there are students who are just out to get professors because "they failed him/her" and are taking it personally.

[Misfire]

On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this professor to a classmate?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...5/b3969090.htm

[rja87]

I can't see many people taking it seriously, if they failed they'll give a bad review, if they did well it will be good etc, I always just try to get through it quickly and never bother adding any comments, if people take the time to write a positive comment it's probably a real response but otherwise I wouldn't read much into them.

[lastchance]

I agree with everyone above. The most useful responses you will get are the general "would you want to take another class with this prof" junk, and the specific comments. Do not create a long questionnaire with many multiple choice type answers.

Ask for comments, throw in a general overall satisfaction score (or some crap like that), and maybe something about difficulty.

[Misfire]

[ QUOTE ]
I can't see many people taking it seriously, if they failed they'll give a bad review, if they did well it will be good etc

[/ QUOTE ]

No necessarily. I had an easy-A class, but the professor didn't teach us a goddamn thing==total waste of my time and money. So many of us complained about the prof that she got fired. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[XXXNoahXXX]

misfire,

i was on the student committee that reviewed professor evals and presented them to the tenured faculty.

i was sick of their awful, awful evaluation form, so I did the best I could to make it better.

we had one question about overall gpa, and another about "whether the grade expected in this class will be higher or lower".

basically, after running all sorts of fancy SPSS analyses I was able to show them who was actually a bad professor and who was just a tough grader. previously, they hadn't even been factoring the student's grades into it.


if people with bad grades complain and good grades praise, well duh. what you need to pay attention to are the people with bad grades that praise and people with good grades that complain.

[hanster]

I go to UCLA and it has a great system of evaluating professors on www.bruinwalk.com. I dont think non-ucla studnets/faculty can access it though. It's a volunteer survey form. It has been going on for several years and I think because of how much it had helped students the rating system has been fairly accurate for almost every class I've taken, and thus have been using it as a Bible for class selection. Now, I don't know how long it will take to develop a system like that but I would think a long while.

There's also the student evaluation forms that you speak of. I take it rather seriously but IIRC most students don't, and just bubble the scores and write an one-liner for the comment section.

[tabako]

I take the evaluations seriously, and try my best to be objective about each question. Each department at my school has their own teacher evaluation form, so any individual professor cannot customize the form for his class. While other students might praise professor's teaching ability just because their class was easy, I try to separate the two concepts. In most departments there is a question that pertains to the ease of the class, and obviously there are questions about how well the teacher presented material.

I only use the forms as a sort of "revenge" if I really think the professor should not be teaching (this has only happened once, in a class I got an 'A' in).

The hardest questions for me to answer are the ones that ask how a professor could present material better. While I may be able to recognize a good teacher from a bad teacher, I don't necessarily know how to change one into the other.