As the semester comes to a close, student evaluations of instructors are in full-swing and some instructors and students alike have mixed feelings about their importance.
Course evaluations are reviewed at the end of each semester and university chairs and deans look for response trends.
While some instructors strongly profess that student responses have and will make an impact on their instructing methods, some are shaking their heads.
According to Lynn Little, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics, it is extremely important students give feedback on their instructors so they will know how well they are doing.
“It is not always obvious to an instructor how well he or she is teaching,” Little said. “So feedback from the students can be very helpful in pointing, both what the instructor is doing right, and what he or she is doing wrong, in the judgment of students.”
Such evaluations also help the department chairs and the dean monitor the quality of teaching in the college, he said.
Many students might also wonder if their evaluations carry any weight within a respective department should they give an instructor a poor review.
Little said in a rare event that a majority of students in a class would give a professor a scathing evaluation, he expected the chair of the department to address the matter with the instructor and work with him or her to resolve the issue.
“Everyone wants to succeed, and this includes instructors who are not viewed by their students as succeeding,” Little said. “I would expect the instructor to work to overcome whatever is keeping him or her from succeeding in the classroom.”
In addition, Little said scathing student evaluations, over successive semesters, would likely lead to the instructor leaving the institution.
Little said he dealt with a similar instance at a previous institution.
“After several semesters without improvement, the instructor was given a terminal contract and left the institution,” he said.
While poor evaluations might encourage an instructor to develop more successful teaching methods, when an instructor receives an outstanding evaluation by the majority of his or her students, this mark of success becomes part of the instructor’s employment record and is considered in his or her progress towards tenure and promotion, Little emphasized.
Little said he reads each student evaluation response and looks for how well the instructor is teaching.
Some common praises he has seen are students saying an instructor presents material in a way that he or she can easily understand.
On the other hand, students also complain particular instructors do not have an interesting presentation style.
Little said he tries to personally praise instructors when he passes them in the hallway for receiving outstanding student evaluations.
“If there are problems, I bring the matter up with the instructor’s chairperson when I meet with him or her,” he said. “It is important that I let individual chairpersons deal directly with any problems that their faculty members may be having, including low student evaluations.”
According to David Rankin, chair of the English department, every single change he has made in his career as an instructor has more lectures, a change of books, or anything else, I do my best to make those changes so that my students are receiving the best of my ability as an instructor.”
Rankin said he also reads every comment from students about their instructors.
He mainly looks for patterns of consistency, he said.
“I wish there were some way to get students more serious about evaluations,” he said.
When Rankin receives a less-than-stellar review of an instructor in his department, he immediately informs him or her of the changes they need to make.
In fact, at Winthrop University, a state school in South Carolina, where Rankin served twice as chair of his department, students gave poor reviews of a teacher saying her attitude was too negative in the classroom.
“She had an extremely thick Eastern European accent which was initially intimidating to students,” he said. “Her teaching methods were comparable to how one might teach in the Soviet Union—the teacher is the boss, and they are very demanding.”
According to Rankin, such behavior is never in the students’ best interest, so he dealt with the individual accordingly to better assimilate her into teaching in the American method.
“Pattern is the key word—with concerns or praise,” he continued. “These are the things I will put in their reports.”
The system is far from perfect, however.
Rankin pointed out in some cases, he can tell when students have given glowing reviews of their professors simply because the class was easy.
He said he came to that conclusion in seeing that a majority of the students have received A’s when the course load should have been much more challenging.
“In those instances,” Rankin said, “The comment sections will read something like ‘he is great fun,’ but offer no other substance about the instructor.”
According to both Rankin and Little, evaluations at their previous institutions were essentially identical to those conducted at MSU.
Nathan Jun, philosophy professor and four-year-member of the MSU Faculty Senate, had a different view of student evaluations in that, essentially, they are a huge waste of time for everyone involved.
“Social scientific research surrounding course evaluations are unanimous,” he said. “They don’t provide any useful information for the instructor being evaluated, and they don’t really tell us anything. Very rarely will you get a nuanced, thoughtful response.”
Jun said one of the only things they might affect is an instructor’s ability to receive tenure in the future. At the same time, he questions the students’ credibility in evaluating a professor, mainly because they have no idea what specific duties are required of a particular professor.
“Why assume that students are in a position to evaluate us?” he continued. “They might have assumptions, but, for the most part, they have no idea what my job entails.”
Jun said a couple of years ago MSU tried implementing online student evaluations, which would make the data transfer to an instructor’s website much easier while at the same time saving money and time.
However, due to a lack of student response, the evaluations were returned back to the paper format.
“At some point, we will have to get the results online,” he said.
Getting students to take their own personal time to actually fill-out an online evaluation will be the trick, he said.
“The university might try to use incentives in order to encourage students to complete their online evaluations, but the burden should not rest solely on the instructor,” Jun explained.
Jun said he truly believes student evaluations are simply giant popularity contests based on whether or not students “like” an instructor and do not include anything specifically objective about that person’s teaching methods.
In spite of all this, Jun said he still takes time to carefully read the comments students make about him and his methods of teaching.
“Student evaluations really do make an impact on instructors,” Little said. “Faculty members go into teaching because of their love for their subject matter, and they want to share both the subject matter and their love for the subject matter with their students. When they find out, through student evaluations, that they are not doing that as well as they would like, that is a real downer for them. They take it very seriously, and they respond by trying hard to improve their teaching.”
