Some of Jim's comments make me wonder if student evaluations in the
States are taken before or after the students sit final exams and get
their grades? We do evaluations before, so they don't in general give the
'my teacher gave me a B so he/she's a good guy' type response. It may be
that, in Australia, we do less continuous assessment during the semester.
I've used the evaluation questions Jim criticised with my students, and
found the responses very helpful. They are more focussed on looking for
good teaching & learning than most. However if my students had already
done their final assessment (or received most of their assessment during
the semester) I could well imagine that their responses could just
degenerate to cases of sour grapes, or the converse.