I did very well, thank you.
So you averaged four out of five?
Yes, that kind of average is atypical. Here's it's much closer to 3.2/5. At my previous institution, which is much more like yours than this one is, it was 3.5/5. At the institution where I taught before that one, an institution that is in the same region as yours, it was closer to 3.9/5 (which reflected students too polite to complain, rather than a faculty especially committed to teaching).
What do I look like, a saint? Please.
Sorry, the numbers I just gave you are school-wide, not departmental, and I have many more examples if you want them. I was charged with collecting these sorts of numbers for a committee recently, so I'm a regular IBM punch card on the subject.
I'm pretty stunned that it's this high, and really don't know what to make of it. To the point where I'm wondering if it's a computer glitch.
My numbers are school-wide, too.
My stats instructor averaged I think 1.5 across all categories on the midcourse evaluations, if that's informative for you.
Reporting the mean without some measure of variance?
5: Back when I was in college, I gave a lot of across-the-board top scores -- combination of laziness, not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings, and not feeling that I was in a position to knowledgably critique what a professor was doing. I dropped from top scores when I had a strong negative opinion, but not really otherwise.
If your students are both nice (which you've said they are) and modest (which you've said they are) very high scores seem as if they'd be expected.
Reporting the mean without some measure of variance?
I know the total n, and my percentile, so someone clever could probably figure it out.
I gave a lot of across-the-board top scores . . . not feeling that I was in a position to knowledgably critique what a professor was doing.
This doesn't make sense to me. Surely a professor was supposed to be effectively teaching you relevant material, which is exactly what you were in a position to critique.
4.5 out of 5 is a B+/A-, right? That's probably what students expect for being nice and trying to please.
Wow, by comparison to the evaluations I've seen in the HAL world, you've got fairly low averages.
I'm not saying it is easier in the tech (HAL) world though. We were told that everyone was expected to be rated 5.0 out of 5.0, but even at that, 10% would be laid off and only 10% would be recognized worthy of a raise or promotion. So the ratings became fairly worthless, and the rankings became everything.
Layoffs used to happen once a year, but now I hear that they have started layoffs every month, so no one feels secure at any time.
Now, working for a non-profit foundation (Mayo), we are rated pass/fail, and raises go across the board evenly to all of those who are rated "pass." What a change. I like this much better.
I'd attribute it to laziness and maybe an excess of good-feeling - the ones who don't have any beef put 5 by default (not that that's what I did), those few who do put 1 or 2.
Presumably the conditions under which the evaluations are given matter a lot. I filled out an evaluation for a class recently. It was the very last thing I did for the class, right after I had taken the exam, and I just wanted to get the fuck out of there. So I rushed through, gave a bunch of high marks, and turned it in. Maybe if I had spent more time on it I would have thought of some reasons for adding in some demerits.
I hate getting student evaluations. They make me feel so bad, no matter how broadly good they are. What a wimp I am.
TAs in my department average about 4.5/5; don't know about professors. I had previously assumed that that was due largely to the good cop/bad cop aspect of the lecturer/TA setup, but maybe not.
11: Well, I was always very clearly aware of my shortcomings as a student, which makes it a bit harder to spot where a teacher may have been lacking.
Heebie U. has a much higher average than Robberbaron Bloodmoney U. Or than UW-Madison in the 1990s.
ReadIng evals depresses me, too, even when they're good.
Whenever I do midterm evaluations, I can count on the underachievers to be completely self-flagellating and shred themselves for their shortcomings. I do it just because it amuses me because it's so predictable. I'd believe the rural politeness of Heebie U is operating here. It's not exactly white rural, since we've got a ton of minorities, but it's not big city anything.
Toyota technicians frequently take the time to explain to me that anything less than a perfect 5 on the post-service survey is considered a "fail" for them (it's a pre-printed form they hand out). So of course I give them all 5s unless the service was really crappy, but I feel bad because I recognize that it corrupts the results when comparing across companies. "X is consistently the highest-rated company in service quality" shouldn't mean "X's employees are encouraged to guilt-trip the customers into giving out high ratings." (That said, the service really is pretty good compared with other companies I have used in the past.)
I was always deeply suspicious regarding the anonymity of teaching evaluations, and skeptical, I think rightly, that a negative review would have any real world impact. So why not be positive -- theres no upside in a bad evaluation and potential downside risk from retribution.
I was always deeply suspicious regarding the anonymity of teaching evaluations, and skeptical, I think rightly, that a negative review would have any real world impact. So why not be positive -- theres no upside in a bad evaluation and potential downside risk from retribution.
Just got my evaluations back and they're way lower than last semester (last semester median of 4.4/5, this semester medians of 3.8/5 and 3.3/5). All three were for the same course with almost nothing changed on my end. The classes were larger this year, and there were more freshman. One of the classes was noticeably worse than my other two, so I'm not shocked by the .5 difference, I was just expecting more like 4.3 and 3.8. It's kinda baffling.
Probably they should just fire teachers of that class every year to keep them getting stale.
As one data point, I almost always refuse to fill out any evaluation. If I have something to say I make myself heard, otherwise filling out evaluations feels like unpaid work to me - more of the trend to reduce costs by making the customer do more work.
In language teaching, the difference between evaluations of first-year and second-year courses is amazing. Everyone loves their first-year teacher, unless that teacher is truly horrific. I learned so much! I couldn't speak any of languageX when I came in, and now I can, like, sort of know pretty much what's going on some of the time! Class was so much fun! The teacher is so awesome and cool and sooooo knowledgable about languageX!
Whereas second-year students often hit a plateau, and take out their general frustration with language learning on the teacher, yielding lots of comments like "[Teacher] just didn't inspire enthusiasm about the language."
Our schoolwide average is 4.0/5.0.
We also adjust individual course evaluations to reflect the fact the students systematically give low ratings to certain kinds of courses. This doesn't change the overall average, but definitely helps the sciences.
I hereby apologize to all the poor teachers I used to write such scathing critiques of. I'm sorry I was an asshole, dudes. Hope you find this thread.
heebie, what's the return rate for your school? Lee gets very good evaluations when compared to others in her division, but the return rate is awful and that means that one negative student can have a huge downward push. I probably get as nervous about hers as she does, but she gets angrier.
Surprisingly, I'm actually pretty sad about my evaluations dropping so much. It felt really great last semester to think I was really good at teaching calculus, but instead I think I just happened to have a good rapport with that class and otherwise be lucky.
I rarely had strong opinions one way or another about teachers, so I'd give them good but not perfect ratings just because, hey, no need to be hard on them if they're doing basically OK but there's always room for improvement, right? On a scale of Excellent-very good-good-fair-poor, I'd probably give an average of "very good". I can only think of two or three teachers I had who I can definitely say were bad, rather than the problem being tough subject matter or me not liking the material or not paying attention.
I got a bit slammed this semester. Some of it was useful information — my explanantions were "round about" and weren't getting the info across clearly, some students actually want quizes or some other mechanism to help force their peers to do the reading — other parts were just depressing — student dislikes professor because they did not want to do the work required and were not sufficiently entertained. Mine were online evals this term and skewed toward the axe grinders. I may go back to in class evals this next semester just to give everyone a push towards filling them out.
I really dislike optional evaluations. I get somewhere around 70% response rate here with the online evaluations, but that's a huge portion of the class not responding.
heebie, what's the return rate for your school?
Can't figure it out. My personal return rates were 90%-100%. It's confusing, because it says that I'm being compared to ~6000 surveys. Given that each student takes 5 classes, this is a small fraction of the surveys available each semester, which can't possibly be the return rate.
(Some professors won't let students take the final unless they've finished their surveys. We get daily emails telling us who hasn't rated us yet, so we can badger them. There are a lot of mechanisms to softly encourage participation. I don't do any of those, but I'm sure my numbers go up, because once a student is sitting at the computer, they go ahead and fill out all the surveys for the semester.)
I wish there was some way to get evaluations broken down by the grades the students got.
I think it should be easier for me to objectively evaluate how good my assignments/exams were than evaluate myself. Objectively I'm quite confident that I improved on this front from last semester to this semester: I fixed a couple issues with the homeworks but left them 95% identical, and the exams were similar except that this semester I was more consistent in difficulty and I didn't have any fatal errors on exams. Last semester I got 4.3 for materials, this semester I got 4.6 and 3.7 respectively. So I'm pretty sure that having a relatively weak class drops evaluations by close to a full point.
I have no idea what the average was for TAs when I was in grad school, and I didn't teach that much, but I had the impression that 3.5 was a bit on the low side. In retrospect, we should have talked about evals openly. I never knew where I stood on that metric - except for the class that hated me and the class that loved me - but I was not comfortable with pretty much anything having to do with teaching except for explaining things/the one time I gave a lecture.
I can endorse 27 and 30. Although I stopped filling out evals towards the end of college. I fill them out now, sometimes. I have a real problem with forgetting the deadlines for the online submission process, which inevitably comes around right when everything I've put off doing is due.
I'm told here that when a class has a low eval response rate, the assumption is that this is a sign of negative feeling on the part of the students. I'm not sure that's wrong.
The real goal of academic evaluations should be to incorporate them into the education of the students so that they irrevocably learn that they will primarily encounter them in their future roles as consumers/employees/help desk supplicants where they will experience their deployment by powerful organizations to quantitatively prove with data™ that the powerful organization is not in fact fucking everyone up the ass with a meathook, but rather giving out health-enhancing massages.
Back when I was in college, I gave a lot of across-the-board top scores -- combination of laziness, not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings, and not feeling that I was in a position to knowledgably critique what a professor was doing.
Likewise.