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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, May 05, 2005

QUELLE SURPRISE

Course Rating Surveys Not Taken Seriously

UD has railed against the absurdity of the excessive and overlong course evaluation form more than once on this blog. She has even tried resisting this end-of-semester comic opera in various modest ways. But despite students' deafness to it, the rate me/rate my teaching libretto must be performed every semester in every class, precisely as written.

The leit motif of the evaluation form is Love me or I won't get a raise. UD figures students shy away from the form because they are as embarrassed by it as she is.



So what to do about the fact that while faculty and administrators are playing along, students aren't? "Many students rush through the evaluations... [They] ... fill out evaluations hurriedly and without a thought to what happens to them." Rather than ask whether this general indifference suggests that the heavy-handed approach to evaluation that has evolved over the last few years is bogus, the university is "working to encourage everyone to take evaluations more seriously."

The article doesn't clarify what the university intends to do toward this end, but UD has some ideas for browbeating students into submission. Money rewards. Pastries. Course Evaluation Appreciation Week. Course Evaluation Appreciation Fair.

[Wow. Here's a very straightforward form of blackmail UD hadn't thought of: At the University of Virginia, they're proposing withholding students' grades until they fill out the effing form:

"One easy method for ensuring high response rates is tying the release of grades to the completion of online evaluations. A student would take three minutes of his or her time in order to get access to that course's grade prior to the next semester. Think of it as a penny toll everyone has to pay for the benefit of the larger community."

Wow.]




Here's a fine analysis of the course evaluation phenom from the AAUP journal, Academe. Read it all.

On the assumption that you won't read it all, UD presents the following excerpts:



* Its subtitle: "Inaccurate, Demeaning, Misused"

* "Should we be willing to define "effectiveness" merely in terms of student satisfaction? In judging colleagues for tenure or raises, why are faculty so willing to trust judgments made by students in areas beyond their competence to judge?"

* "At most, ratings may identify the very best and the very worst teachers, but they are ill designed to make fine distinctions in the vast intermediate range. Moreover, the use of student evaluations against faculty members appears to adversely affect the educational experience of students. In one survey of faculty, 72 percent said that administrative reliance on student evaluations encourages faculty to water down course content. And a careful study at Duke University by statistician Valen Johnson demonstrated that students' expectations of grades influence their ratings of teachers. His finding provides a powerful incentive for faculty to raise grades. Johnson argues that 'the ultimate consequences of such manipulation is the degradation of the quality of education in the United States.' "

* "If ratings measure only student satisfaction, how does one assess the real effectiveness of a teacher? Among the many other measures available are student performance on exams and assignments, effectiveness in mentoring students, availability of the instructor, the teacher's commitment to curriculum development, involvement of students in the research of the faculty member, and teaching portfolios prepared by faculty."

* "Finally, the reliance on evaluations is bad for the health of relations between students and faculty. Jeffrey Stake, a law professor at Indiana University, argues that asking students their opinions undermines the trust and faith they need to place in the teacher. Instead of saying, 'Here is a great scholar and teacher; learn from her what you can,' the administration of evaluation forms says to students, 'We hired these teachers, but we are not sure they can teach or have taught you enough. Please tell us whether we guessed right.' "

* "As an entire career can be terminated by not-good-enough evaluations, the procedure of administering the evaluation instruments and getting them turned in forces on the faculty member what Catholics call 'an occasion of sin.' The administration sets up a system that presents the faculty with a powerful temptation to cheat, and then has to invent demeaning procedures to prevent cheating. The teacher is explicitly forbidden to touch the evaluation sheets after they have been filled out. A student has to be designated to collect and take them to the appropriate office. This procedure tells the students that the teacher is more than likely to be a cheat and a sneak, who will cook the books if given a chance. Both students and teacher pretend not to notice the shaming involved, but it is palpable in such a situation."

* "This means of judging teaching has no validity and is demeaning to faculty. Those of us who understand this truth have a responsibility to wake up our colleagues on the faculty and the administration to the facts. Perhaps when we have done so, we can move toward getting rid of this inaccurate, misleading, and shaming procedure."