Re: Are student evaluations useful?

["Rauber, Joel Phys" <RAUBERJ@mg.sdstate.edu>]

> The students were pretty savvy. They knew that the answer had to be
> "yes, very much" if one wanted to give the instructor high marks,
> even in an elementary mechanics class! They lied without remorse.


A couple of anecdotes.

A)
The form we used several years ago had a question along the lines of: " My 
instructor made me think".  They had to rate each question 1-5, 1 meaning 
agree most strongly with the statement.

One instructor in our department, who usually gets worse than average 
evaluations and who also has higher than average standards in his classes, 
would always be rated quite well on this question (near 1) compared to the 
other questions.  I had noticed similar phenomena in my own evaluations.

My interpretation is that in the student's mind it was *bad* teaching if the 
instructor made them think, they didn't like this guy so they rated him bad 
everywhere; little realizing that they were accidently rating the instructor 
well for this question!

(I should note that all our survey questions were intended to be such that 
low numerical ratings are indications of "good" teaching; that way the 
computer could just average up the ratings giving a single numerical 
"objective" score to assign to the instructor.)  We have had administrators 
that seriously made a distinction between teachers with a composite rating 
of 2.87 versus 2.85.

B)
The most helpful piece of advise I got from evaluations was as an 
undergraduate physics major, where I instructed an intro laboratory.  As an 
undergraduate student we had to be evaluated (regular faculty weren't given 
student evaluations in those days at my undergraduate institution).  One 
student suggested that I not chew gum while giving my opening statements 
about that day's lab; this was a bad habit I developed due to the 
nervousness of my first teaching situation.  The next semester I followed 
that advice, and to this day it remains the best piece of constructive 
criticism I've received from my student evaluations.

Joel

PS
As to Margaret's comparison to Australia with the US, it would be my guess 
that in the US there is more continuous monitoring of student's progress. 
 So at my institution the evaluations are given the week before final exams 
and my students know very well what sort of grade they are likely to receive 
for the course, I drop the lowest exam score for my students which might be 
half the final exam if that was their lowest score; this means my final is 
either 30% or 15% of the course grade.