Teaching Evaluations
By There’s a very nice discussion of teaching evaluations going on over at Crooked Timber. My evaluations, both as an instructor and a TA, have always been strong, so I’ve accordingly been a strong proponent of the evaluation system. That said, Harry and the commenters do a good job of identifying some more or less unavoidalble problems of student evaluation.
1. The instructor gets credit for conditions beyond his or her control. This includes TA quality, room comfort, time of day, and subject matter (less subject to control than you might think). The problem is, of course, even worse for TAs, who often get blamed for reading load and grading policies that they have no control of whatsoever.
2. Higher grade expectations tend to produce higher evaluations. The University of Washington has a system for correcting this problem, but I don’t know a) how reliable it is, or b) how extensively other universities use such a system.
3. Entertaining and informative instructors are not always the same, and the entertaining ones tend to get the higher evals. Full disclosure: I lean heavily toward the entertaining side of the dichotomy. . .
4. Smart instructors can play the system. I gave up the “evaluation inflation” speech years ago, and I’ve never really paid attention to whether it helped or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised. In addition, more than few instructors play the grade expectations game. Midterms get a relatively high average grade, say 3.2. When the midterms are handed back, you inform the students that the class average was a 2.8, which convinces a fair number that they’re doing well. Evaluations are usually done prior to the handing back of papers and final exams, which, graded harshly, will bring the class average down to a more reasonable number. Not that I’ve ever done that. . .
5. Students evaluate on relatively unalterable personal characteristics. Being tall, short, male, female, black, or white matters.
That said, I still think the system is defensible. I’ve worked for lots of professors as a TA, I’ve supervised a number of TAs, and I’ve served a couple of times on my departmental financial aid committee. Although there are some curious outliers, it seems that my estimation of an individuals teaching ability tends to correlate pretty well with the student evaluations.
Now, I just wish that the good folks who make up the demand half of the job market would pay more attention to my high evals and less to my dreadful publication record. . .