If you ever want to rile up a college professor (particularly a younger one), ask how she feels about course evaluations. Like Comcast or Mitch McConnell, the course eval is a topic that almost no one feels lukewarm about and pretty much everyone outright loathes.
We all know why course evals exist. College students appreciate being given the opportunity to share feedback, and universities generally welcome their thoughts. Undergrads are adults who have over a decade of "being a student"
experience to draw from, and they have direct, continuous access to their teacher's job performance. Surveying students is much easier (and cheaper) than implementing a review process that involves a third party.
(Now's as good a time as any to mention how continually shocked I was throughout the past several years by how little oversight my teaching received outside course evaluations. I went entire semesters -- including last fall, when I taught at a brand new school where no one knew who I was -- with no one other than myself vetting my syllabus or spot-checking my classes to ensure I wasn't doing anything crazy. I guess colleges have discovered that the people willing to lecture teens about Keats for poverty wages are generally try-hards who can be trusted not to abuse the position.)
In evaluations, students are typically asked to rate their professors
on a 1-5 scale for qualities like openness, enthusiasm,
knowledgeability, and fairness, while rating the class itself for
qualities like difficulty, workload, interesting-ness, and overall
likeability. This section generates bar graphs and other metrics that seem reassuringly science-y and objective.
Following the stats, students are inevitably invited to leave
free-range comments about a course's strengths and weaknesses -- which is where real feelings are unleashed, and where the fantasy of the dispassionate course evaluation breaks down, as students are revealed to be, uh, imperfect judges of their own pedagogical experiences. Here, the difference between academic course evals and traditional job performance reviews becomes more glaring. The evaluation's Additional Comments section is a house of mirrors constructed out of half-formed thoughts and personal criticism. It's filled with a lot of glowing, ego-stroking praise ("One of the most interesting and engaging English classes I have ever taken!"; "Professor Martin is a great teacher"; "Professor really wants students to succeed, learn, understand, and enjoy the material") accompanied by a eye-catching smattering of hyperbolic grievances ("Sadly, I must look into the past to remember what it is that I used to love about English"; "Miss Martin has the classic new teacher syndrome where she feels the need to give bad grades to prove her worth as a challenging professor. Give her a few years to calm down."). Contradictions abound: the class was too easy and too hard; boring and fascinating. There was not enough and too much small-group work. Peculiarly, no matter what, nearly everyone answers "Yes" to the question, "Would you recommend this class to another student?"
It's a mess. But is it a useful mess? What are these things actually for?
They're not used to assess professors' performance -- not really, anyway. University administrators occasionally suggest that they scan course evaluations for red flags -- and I assume we're talking about, like, showing-up-drunk-to-class levels of incompetence -- but there's little evidence to support that actually happening. At best, admins use aggregated metrics to assess and brag about overall outcomes for the school: 92% of our student body give our teachers an "Excellent" rating! This makes evals valuable to university administration only in a Big Data kind of way, a form of 30,000-foot-view quality control. (It's worth noting that many academic departments do cop to using course evals during tenure reviews or hiring decisions for contingent faculty, but this practice has been widely revealed to be a pretty terrible idea.)
More often, probably, we imagine professors using evaluations personally, as self-improvement tools and to gather suggestions on how to tweak their courses. We may picture them reviewing their students' thoughtful commentary through sensible reading glasses, seated comfortably in a leather-backed chair, chewing pensively on a bulldog pipe. But, as you may guess from the snippets above, that image is... unrealistic. In my experience, older, wiser[, tenured] professors almost universally don't read their evals. For those who can't resist, unless you want to wildly un-calibrate your self-esteem, your best course of action is to glance over the evaluation document briefly to scan for obvious trends. (You don't want to see everyone concluding that your course was a breeze or that your grading standards are impossible.) Having checked that, you should promptly pack it away into the Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse, never to be seen again.
Weirdly, on balance, I'm still in favor of course evaluations. I think their benefits -- limited as they are -- justify their existence. The jury's still out on whether more of these are in my future or not, but to date (and at the risk of sounding too much like Calvin's Dad), dealing with course evaluations has felt character-building. Knowing how to grapple with this strange genre of critique feels like a skill, in the same way that managing hecklers becomes a point of pride among stand-up comedians.
... That's not a very flattering comparison, but it still feels pretty apt.
