It’s Annual Report (AR) time again, and it’s time again to cover the concept of teacher evaluation. I am an “assessment guy” and I appreciate getting useful feedback from students who are completing the courses I teach. I solicit that feedback with zeal. I want my students to help me out.

Yet, there is no incentive for them to comply with “yet another email” in their inboxes. And multiple years of experience, seeing poor instructors persist, has led several students disenchanted with the value of student evaluations.

This year is the worst I’ve seen. Of the six potential courses I taught, i received TWO reports that met the threshold for teacher reporting. The threshold is there to guarantee that a student’s responses are truly anonymous. I guess some petty individuals could use their skills of deduction to narrow in on THAT ONE student who “hates them”…

So, in my AR form, I wrote this in the section devoted to course evaluation:

Firstly, there needs to be a systematic improvement (campus wide) in the way that student evals are solicited. Across the board, in my instance, response rates are terrible; Despite repeated mentions by me in emails to all students, and in any face to face meetings; Despite repeated reminders from the University office offering the evaluations.

Let me be especially clear about this: Basing ANY amount of a faculty member’s evaluation on this ridiculous effort on the part of the University is unfair at the least, and outright capricious and punitive at the worst. Even though my evaluation scores “look” acceptable (from the few courses that exceeded the threshold for me), how can a person make a claim that their teaching is exemplary? That would certainly be an unsupported claim in my case.

In the days of scantron evals, there was a much better response rate. I am NOT advocating for a return to scantrons. Rather, I am advocating for a return to the routine that accompanied their use. That is, the instructor would read a script about the nature of the evaluations, distribute the evaluations and pencils, enlist an attendant to deliver the completed scantrons in a sealed envelope, and then leave the room so the students can complete the evaluations.

For fully online classes, what can be an incentive? Can the evals be completed using a cell phone or other device? Here is an idea: Schedule webconference final presentations for all online classes. Encourage during the first 10-15 minutes of that final meeting to open a second browser window, open the email that carries the evaluation link, and complete the evaluation.

I have had intellectual arguments about the relative value of student evaluations. One side says they are a coward student’s way of getting off some cheap-shots without fear of reprisal. (2) Others say that teachers who have taught many years have relatively little reason to care, and far more reasons to discount the value of the results. (3) Yet anther faction says it is unfair to use these scores as part of a formal evaluation (my camp) given how little they actually reflect student ability to gauge teaching success, (4) And fourth among many, the folks who glow in their teaching evaluations think they are great and don’t need to be changed. (5) Others blithely assign to their students the invariable ability to know their grade, and thus decide that the teacher is fair and good (when earnin a good grade) and capricious and unfair (when earning a grade lower than they desired).

I found value in teaching evaluations early in my career (during the Scan-tron days), because I had the sense that many students were giving their honest (or as best they could) appraisal of the concepts they were asked to evaluate. I have not always had good teaching evaluations, and I learned more from the poor ones than from the good ones. Honestly, what am I supposed to do with a comment like “Dr. Kenton rocks”?

Anyhow, it feels like an opportunity lost, and the Institution shrugs its shoulders.

Comments?