You may be the type who does little more than circle the numbers on student evaluations. Or, you may be that person who spends ten minutes detailing the nuances of a syllabus, and even turns in everyone else’s at the class’s end.
Students completed some 8,000 evaluations this December. Now that a new term is underway, what’s to become of these comments and criticisms?
According to Judith Brown, vice president for academic affairs and provost, the evaluations, which are optional and anonymous, serve as useful resource for administrators charged with making personnel decisions.
“Members of the Advisory Committee, for example, spend many hours carefully reading the student course evaluations of faculty who are reviewed for promotion,” said Brown. “They read the comments that students write in the evaluations, not just the numerical results and they discuss the comments and the numerical ratings at great length during their deliberations. The course evaluations are an important component of every tenure and promotion review.”
In addition, the evaluations allow professors to reflect on their pedagogical techniques and the design of their courses.
“Each professor uses their evaluations in their own way,” said Professor of Religion Peter Gottschalk. “Personally, I review all my evaluations once I receive them at the end of a semester to gauge my overall teaching effectiveness and determine whether there’s anything I need to take into account for the courses I’m teaching the next semester. I also review the evaluations of a specific course when I’m re-writing the syllabus the next time I teach it.”
Many professors will speak plainly about the impact evaluations have had in changing the way they teach.
“I have always tended toward discussion-based learning,” Gottschalk said. “But, since many of my students have asked for more lecture, I have structured more lecture into my classes. At the same time, as a teacher I recognize that some of my pedagogical techniques might not appeal to everyone. So I have to balance the responses with my own sense regarding pedagogical effectiveness and appropriateness.”
“I’ve relied on them in redesigning courses and in considering how I teach,” said Associate Professor of American Studies Sean McCann. “In a number of cases, they’ve had a major influence on what material I teach and on how I teach it. There are pedagogical approaches I’ve dropped because of evaluations and some methods that I’ve added because of recommendations students made to me.”
With anonymity comes candidness. Some students use such evaluations as opportunities to lavish their professors with praise or, conversely, unleash scathing criticism. While North College does not release evaluations, similar comments can be found on Esquid, the WSA-administered site in which students can rate both professors and courses.
“[This professor] was entirely uninspiring,” wrote an anonymous student of a professor who has since been asked to leave the University. “My experience with her caused me to rethink majoring in AFAM.”
Fortunately, the Administration is confident in its ability to distinguish between nuanced criticism and bitter ranting. For many professors, when it comes to student opinions, majority rules.
“In my experience, few students take out bad grades on me through the evaluations,” Gottschalk said. “However, if they do, it’s usually obvious when one extremely critical evaluation stands out so differently from others.”
“Students sometimes tip their hands with the tone of their comments,” said English Professor William Stowe. “An evaluation that is wildly inconsistent with the others in the class is suspect. But my favorite example is the student who took me to task for my ignorant interpretation of a text that was not in the course.”
According to Stowe, the sheer volume of the evaluations allows professors to weed out the thoughtful from the vindictive.
“Those of us who have read literally thousands of them over the years have learned to filter out predictable static to get a pretty good picture of a colleague’s performance in relation to others,” Stowe said.
While the evaluations provide the occasional student an opportunity to vent, administrators and professors alike say that students’ comments are thoughtful.
“I’ve found Wesleyan students to be remarkably thoughtful, responsible, and generous in their use of evaluations,” McCann said. “I’m very grateful to my students for that, and I hope that all students are mindful when they fill out evaluations that the evaluations are extremely important.”
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