When I received my course evaluations for my first semester as a real professor, my previous experiences with the differences between my current and former students caused some concern. Due to the amount of things I had to do near the end of the fall semester I had never even looked closely at the evaluation form until the registrar returned the completed forms to me.
Looking at the evaluations, I was struck by two things: 1) my teaching looked good numerically; and 2) these numbers told me next to nothing about the way students perceived my courses. The item related to class discussions provides a good example. I have always considered class discussions to be one of the weaker areas of my teaching, no matter how many teaching seminars on the topic I attended (maybe my students didn’t discuss things because they weren’t doing the reading). Items asking students about the quality of class discussions reflected this (in the subtle way that a difference of .03 on a five-point scale can reflect something). Looking over my newly opened evaluations, however, I was struck by the fact that the only question about class discussions was related to whether I encouraged them. I did well on this item, having spent several minutes of each class prodding students to discuss things as a class. There was no corresponding item, however, about whether my attempts at promoting class discussion were successful. Any student assessments of the quality of class discussions would have to be offered spontaneously by students on the qualitative portion of the evaluations.
As a result, what I feel was the weakest portion of my courses received an apparently strong quantitative evaluation and a nearly-nonexistent qualitative evaluation. While I was nervous before opening my evaluations, my feelings afterward were closer to apathy. Nearly every semester I need to remind students that, no, merely showing up does not count as class participation. Based on the current evaluation form, though, it seems that professors at my school are being held to this sort of “A for effort” standard.
Memoirs of a SLACer 
[…] February 16, 2010 by John After another rash of first-exam failures, this time in another course, I have identified what I am calling the “wait-and-see approach to exams.” In this approach, students view the first exam as an unknown entity. Because they do not know what to expect from a professor in terms of exam style, difficulty, and grading they apply minimal effort in their studying. “Maybe,” they think, “this professor writes easier exams and grades more leniently than all prior professors, in which case spending three or even four hours studying would be a monumental waste of my time. By waiting to see how the first exam goes after 10 minutes of studying I can minimize my effort and in the event that it is unwarranted.” (An alternative approach would be to over-study for the first exam in the event that a professor writes harder exams and grades more stringently than all prior professors. I suspect that these students exist in much smaller numbers than their wait-and-see counterparts.) Alternative explanations for this performance are that “they just don’t care,” that “Dr. Smith doesn’t show enough videos to keep students interested for an entire 50 minutes,” that “like this year’s East coast snowstorms, this class of poor students is an anomaly and is likely never to be seen again,” and that “Dr. Smith is a poor professor.” The final option has been rejected in the interest of mental health. Besides, at least I’m trying. […]
[…] to experience the joy of getting my student evaluations back. (See previous posts on evaluations here and here.) Other than students who complain about having to write papers or complete readings or […]
[…] where the evaluations went from questioning the quality of class discussions to questioning whether I tried to have students discuss things, this new evaluation form demonstrates some of the things that an […]