I think the difference between evaluation and feedback is pretty important. To me, feedback is someone else’s observation of me, with the hope of showing me how others perceive me and helping me become a better instructor. This seems to me really valuable, and I would hope that any professor would seek out feedback from students and peers. In the places where I’ve worked, feedback is usually either filling out a form with comments and then discussing it, or happens informally – where I’ve been a lead instructor, I’ve usually done feedback and a check-in with the other staff every night. It seems like that’s what you’re looking for, Prof. Burke. It gives you a sense of what’s effective and what’s not. It doesn’t necessarily assign you a score, and it can be really hard to communicate to other people.

I think of evaluations as being focused on measuring, rather than improving, someone’s performance. That’s where the popularity of standardized tests, evaluations, etc, comes in. I realize that performance does need to be measured on some occasions – mostly when it needs to be communicated to someone who wasn’t there, like a grant funder or an accreditation committee – but that kind of evaluation, in my experience, is not very helpful in terms of telling people what they need to change. In fact, I worked for 2 years at a place with feedback forms that included a 1-5 rating on probably 7 criteria, and space for written comments: I don’t think the ratings ever helped me with anything. What they do offer is a way for students who haven’t been in a class to figure out what other people think of their professors, or for accreditation committees to make some judgments without actually having to observe classes and read papers. The problem is that this basically always turns into people trying to get higher scores, whether those actually reflect better quality or not (e.g. Swarthmore trying to game the US News rankings).

(Interestingly, much of the most valuable feedback I got from my professors was couched as evaluation of papers. I had a couple of profs who would write all over my papers and then type half-page to full-page responses, and that’s probably the best thing that ever happened to my academic writing. So these things aren’t mutually exclusive, but I think its important that it wasn’t the grade that helped me, it was the detailed feedback.)

Finally, there’s the question of to what extent students’ opinions about their teachers are the best way to measure teaching success. As educators, I think part of our job is to make students uncomfortable. Some students really like that and really appreciate it and will rate professors/teachers/instructors highly for that, but not all, and I suspect it depends a lot on the audience. Also, student evaluations tend to privilege teachers who have good rapport with their students, which is certainly useful but which some teachers do very well without. I think this means that feedback from students is more useful if its more nuanced, just as you said: you need to find out if you achieved the goals of your class, rather than whether the students liked you.

Really finally, it is kind of frustrating being a first-year student and mostly knowing other first-year students and not being able to figure out what classes to take or even how to start to decide that. Having some kind of professor ratings system seemed reallly appealing then.

Though it’s an interesting question: do the Professor Kingsfields of the world get enough respect from students that they get average-to-good numbers in purely numerical systems? My guess is yes, they do.

Student evaluation and feedback is necessary to improving one’s teaching, no doubt, and it ought to be taken seriously. But I am unconvinced that the standard scantron sheets used in most institutions are productive in doing so.

Too many students use these outlets to vent at the amount of reading and the grading. I have tried to focus feedback by asking students to write specific responses to readings, discussion formats, etc., but this is only occasionally successful. The rude and inappropriate comments that many female professors get (I’m not saying this only happens to female teachers but only that I’m familiar with a lot of my female colleagues’ experiences) are also troubling. Some senior colleagues ask us to ignore these as part of the package of teaching undergrads, but what does one ignore and what does one retain when using evaluations to guide your own future classroom behaviour? Especially when they are linked to tenure?

How does one prevent student evaluations from becoming popularity contests that involve cookies on the last day of class or the number of chillies on the RMP site?

One of the interesting things about him is that he also taught remedial English. I often wondered how that worked out, whether what made him a great teacher for AP English could translate to other kinds of classes.

Numerical signals do have a kind of rough significance, as you suggest. If you look at Rate My Professors, for example, there’s something significant about faculty who have a lot of ratings and whose ratings strongly trend towards the bottom of their scale.

At my school, we do use student evaluations, but I generally ignore the numerical scores (both for my own use and when evaluating untenured faculty) unless there is an extremely strong and consistent signal (which will come through in the written comments as well, of course). Unfortunately, there’s a sort of logical fallacy that many people suffer from: that attaching a number to something magically endows that quantity with meaning and precision.

If anyone does find a way to do both, *please* report it to the College Board.