Whaddaya do with student evaluations?
Well, it's the time of year when student evaluations are taken. Here's how we do it:- Pass out two separate evaluation sheets to each student.
- Get a volunteer to collect them and seal them in envelopes.
- Leave the room until the students are done and the envelopes are sealed.
- I leave the room so I can't influence the students' responses, but they're still there to influence each other. Is that type of influence somehow much less significant than my own?
- I know not all authorities are convinced that students' evaluations are tied in to their grades. (This study, for instance, is cautiously convinced.) But I AM convinced. Sure, the students don't KNOW what they're getting yet when the survey gets to them, but they can guess. If they think they are getting a good grade, they will praise me; if they think they are not, they will point out that it is my fault. And if they think they are getting a good grade and don't, they will make up for their survey "error" by blasting me on Virtual Ratings.
Now, I used to encourage students to say stuff about me on Virtual Ratings (as in the picture), but as time went on, I found that the site was never updated. You can see that a year would pass by between ratings for me, at least, and my wife, a full-time faculty member, is rated even less often. You'd also find that the two highest-rated profs on campus, Matt Winkel and Burt Klein, haven't taught a class in nearly two years. AND, you'd find on their home page a link to comments I wrote about four years ago under the heading "NEW!" Finally, you see in the picture that I was evaluated at least once by someone who never took a course from me, and indeed has probably never met me. I would like to know what's keeping Virtual Ratings on the Internet, frankly.Pick-a-Prof is the new thing, and I'm told that TCNJ was paying for the Pick-a-Prof service until about a year ago. Their site is clean, regularly updated, and endorsed heartily by both students and faculty (though I haven't seen any testimonials from anyone at TCNJ). So far, I only have one evaluation there, and when you read it, you can see several reasons for not taking evaluations seriously:
He's a 20 year old trapped in a 45 year old body. He can get boring, but it's a boring subject sometimes. We watched Jerry Maguire and the Apprentice and just talked about starting a business. I want to teach music, and I still enjoyed the class very much, he knows a lot. [...] He can get monotonous, but that's it.While I don't deny the truth of anything the student ("tcnjmusic") said (except maybe about my actual age, about which the student was generous), none of it is relevant to my actual performance. What you see is a student who has no interest in the subject, and was evidently taking a required class because it was required; a student whose interest was in being entertained rather than in learning life skills.
I know from experience that the formal TCNJ evaluations that I wrote about above get information that's no different. They tell me I'm not supposed to see them until they've been processed by management and then returned some months later. For my part, I don't give a shit: I stopped reading them altogether two years ago. They verify things we should know about surveys, and in fact don't:
- that people responding to surveys will sometimes LIE
- that they will answer the wrong questions
- that they will say (even accidentally) what they perceive that the survey taker wants to hear
Labels: education
posted by Ron @ 11:03 AM
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