Student Evaluations: Feared, Loathed, and Not Going Anywhere | Hacker News Reader

Student Evaluations: Feared, Loathed, and Not Going Anywhere

chroniclevitae.com

18 pointsdanso13 comments

If you have to cook evaluations, something is very wrong.

That having been said, allow me to paraphrase the statement I give to my classes when I teach:

"You're supposed to think I'm fair. You're supposed to think I'm competent. You're supposed to learn the subject matter. I demand your respect, not your affection. That's not part of my job description. This entire class can hate my guts by the end, but if you know the material, I've done my job. Are we clear?"

Most classes like me, by and large, because I work very hard to be good at teaching. But not all classes like me. <shrug> So it goes.

As a former academic who used to go through this game I learned that evalutions are inversely related to workload. Once I worked how hard I could push my students I would load up my student to the maximum level possible that would keep my evaluation just above the minimium I had to maintain.

The thing I always found hard to take was comments along the line that the whole course was worthless. I never cared if a student personally liked me or not, but to have a student tell you the subject was worthless made me feel like I totally failed - luckily I only ever got a few of these comments.

"The student doesn't get to decide what's important."

Never forget that. They can decide if they liked the course or not, if they liked your teaching or not, but they are simply not qualified to make a general judgement of its worth.

This is true, but I always felt that I had been unable to explain to them that the subject was important. Anyway it is not a problem I worry much over these days :)

One fundamental problem in evaluating the effectiveness of educators is that the value of an educational experience is realized a long time after it is performed.

Anecdote: When I started high school, we had a teacher in literature who everyone just hated. He was harsh, his tests were hard, the subject was boring, etc. In the third year though, most of us realized that he was very good at teaching, and the things he taught actually stuck. Many years after high school, I consider him the best teacher I've ever had.

He never tried to make himself popular, but he was relentless when it came to teaching. A student evaluation program would have been disastrous for him, and everyone would have been worse off.

While I would not thrust myself to give unbiased evaluations in high school or even at the start of college. But these days, I make an effort to always try and give valuable observations during student evaluations.

Thus I feel like student evaluations should not be discarded, but its a bad idea to have them be the sole garant of teacher performance.

So why not just do the evaluations a year or so later or even more?

Because this would make too much sense.

At my university it is already hard to get students to fill out the evaluations (they aren't mandatory but probably should be). Asking them to do so a year later would result in a near 0 response rate.

Even if evaluations were mandatory, that is no guarantee they will be taken seriously. A lot of students just "Christmas tree" their evaluations and don't offer comments.

"It is when we are using what we learned that we wish we had studied more" - Chinese proverb

Make every class a TED talk. It will be hugely impactful for the 15 minutes of high or buzz that follow. And then little of impact would have been achieved.

Being popular is not important. Getting the job done is.

Given that student evals are one of the few tools students have to fight back against truly horrible and capricious teachers, they need to stay for that reason alone.

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