At most colleges today, students are given the opportunity to evaluate instructors at the end of each class. Along with standardized items, students are invited to offer open-ended narrative comments on the course and instructor. Sometimes the comments are nice; sometimes negative but constructive; sometimes negative and destructive.
Some students will go out of their way to make you look bad. If there are relatively few such comments, the professional consequences aren’t all that bad unless a draconian administrator uses them to justify sanctions against you. The personal consequences often are more serious. You wonder where you went wrong. You dream of retirement.
But the pedagogical consequences are dramatic. Such comments take aim at the very soul of teaching. They haunt you during the teaching day—make you hesitate to take risks in your interactions with students. You pull back from challenging the students in the way they need to be challenged if they are to learn how to think analytically and critically.
They make us worse teachers by intimidation. The effects are insidious and often beyond our conscious awareness. We drop paper assignments and essay sections on exams—multiple-choice exams are so much easier to grade, and then there’s that all too convenient test bank from the textbook company. “Education” goes on because texts are read and taught, answers selected, and grades assigned. But real learning—the kind that involves interaction with a tough-minded opponent or starts with a sheet of blank paper and requires the student to write—is bypassed. The hurtful comments did their share to make it so.
I just thought someone had to say that.
Glenn Hartz is a professor at The Ohio State University Mansfield.
Reprinted from Hurtful Student Comments, The Teaching Professor, January 2008.
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The comments by Hartz about student evaluations touches the tip of the iceberg in my area.
Our evaluations are used as the criteria by which we are retained as annually contracted faculty. The department chair can give us "good marks" but, if the evaluations are low, it counts against us also for pay and seniority.
On the advice of my doctor, I no longer read student evaluations. There is too much at stake for me to become depressed and demoralized over student comments.
I've been teaching for 34 years and have taught junior high, high school, community college, and 21 years at the university level.
Thanks for your sensitive comments.
A very crucial issue in teachers' evaluation….. I work as academic coordinator and the evaluation of teachers is being done by the school management team (SMT) of which i am not part of…. i work for teachers professional development and they share their frustration about their evaluation by students….sometimes this evaluation is done by some studnets who had not attended the actual classes.
such an evaluation creates an issue of popularity…..as some teachers try to be over friendly with the students and try to be popular among them which sometimes is not effective..