Education

I agree with you wholeheartedly that when students take the time to reflect and offer thoughtful evaluations of their experience in class, that can be valuable feedback that faculty can use to improve their teaching, although there is still the question about assessment quality.

What I'm talking about is the use of those evaluations in hiring, retention, promotion, and tenure decisions. I find that especially troubling because the veracity of anonymous evaluations cannot be confirmed, and I believe that some students routinely use the evaluation process for character assassination.

I spoke with a colleague this afternoon who was denied a tenure track position just weeks ago because of negative student evaluations he received during one semester two years ago (I'm my union's Faculty Rights Chairperson on my campus). In fact, his evaluations otherwise were uniformly positive-- he received the bad evals during a semester following a serious accident, after which he was frequently absent while he recovered. He was the dept search committee's first choice for the job, and received unanimous support from his colleagues, but the Dean declined to offer him the job and cited ONLY those few negative evaluations as his reason. We can argue all day long about whether that was right, or fair, or whatever, but the administration has complete control of the hiring process, so there is nothing I can do about it.

That is not an isolated example. I hear about several such instances every semester.

Here's another example. I underwent a five year post tenure review this year. As required, I submitted copies of ALL of my student course evaluations for all the courses I've taught during the past five years-- many hundreds of evaluations. Of course, some students were pleased with my classes and wrote glowing evaluations, others were angry or disappointed and wrote critically, and most fell somewhere between those extremes, but two anonymous students in one class during one semester wrote "the professor is a disgusting pervert who shows pictures of partially naked women in class." Both were phrased nearly identically, suggesting that they were collaborative. In any event, the entire, weeks long post tenure review process became centered on my needing to provide evidence to the personnel committees and administrators that I'm not "a disgusting pervert." Despite the circumstance that no student in any of my classes has any basis for making such an assessment of my personality, the burden of proof fell entirely upon me to show that it wasn't so. Those two student comments, which were likely deliberate character assassination, became the complete and utter focus of my personnel review, which is still ongoing. By the way, the class in question was General Zoology and the naked pics are anatomical diagrams of human female genitalia and reproductive systems provided by the textbook publisher and identical to diagrams in the text (I also showed corresponding illustrations of male genitalia and reproductive anatomy, but those were not cited as "perverted&quot .

Here's a quote from an article in TODAY'S student newspaper regarding class evaluations: "Lowe said 'It's really a popularity contest. I took a class and didn't like the professor, so I gave (his class) a bad review. But my friend liked the class so he gave them a good review. It doesn't mean I didn't learn anything. I just didn't like the professor."

Students who admit to such unprofessional behavior are unwittingly (and unjustly) taking part in hiring, promotion, tenure, and firing decisions. I understand the usefulness of high quality feedback from students-- I use that feedback to inform my future pedagogical decisions. But I still do NOT believe that students are in any way qualified to evaluate their professor's effectiveness or ability. That's even more true of K-12 students.