Right around this time in each semester, most professors encounter one of the great joys of teaching: they receive the results of last semester’s Student Evaluations.
I have spent many hours with my colleagues talking about these documents, which are viewed by a great many professors as one of the great curses of our educational system. In theory, of course, they’re not supposed to be a curse. They’re supposed to help us assess and improve our own teaching ability, and provide students with a vehicle for honest and anonymous feedback that is a matter of public record — all of which, I think, is extremely important. In practice, however, everyone is scared to death that the information gathered on the evaluations is going to be used against them in some yet-to-be-determined way.
And does that happen? Oh, yes, it does. In some academic cultures, if there is a candidate for tenure who has rubbed someone the wrong way, or has unpopular political views, it’s extremely convenient to discover that he or she has some negative student evaluations. But let’s be honest: does this usually happen? Probably not, unless you have a department full of vipers, in which case you might seriously improve you quality of life by getting another job before you’re up for tenure (easier said than done, I know.)
There are, however, other issues connected with student evaluations that have nothing to do with ornery colleagues. They have everything to do with our own peace of mind as instructors. When in a rational, calm mood, or when trying to encourage a colleague who took a hit from one of these things, I have often expressed the opinion that student evaluations should be read as a “big picture.” If a hundred-fifty students think you’re great, and one thinks that you’re a total loser, you don’t probably need to be too worried about the one disgruntled camper. And, I believe that – I really do, when I’m Sittin’ in My Happy Place.
The problem is, if you love your students, you work your ass off more than 40 hours a week trying to stay on top of your field, you try to write interesting courses, and you meet with what seems like a zillion students a week, it feels like a kick in the teeth to read that one of your courses was “The Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever” (my favorite from the most recent batch.)
This does not hurt because I am worried about a tenure committee. I assume, because I am an optimist, that my committee will have already waded through the 149 positive comments before they got to this beaut. And, because I’m an optimist, I also believe that most people on most tenure committees, having gone through the process themselves, are completely aware that these anomalies are just that – anomalies. I also think that most people on tenure committees realize that there is a certain type of student for whom filling out a teacher evaluation form is akin to an opportunity to kick the cat because s/he’s had a lousy day. These students do not write constructive criticism. They do not write things like “I felt that the exams were too extensive to finish adequately in a 50-minute period.” Nor do they write funny comments that you can easily blow off, like “Less quizzes-more hot chicks.” (Yes, that was a real one.) No; they say things like “Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever” or “I hated this professor and I’m going to tell everyone I know not to take a class from him,” without giving one single reason why. (A friend of mine once got that one.) These students are not concerned about the consequences of their comments; in fact, they may have enough spite in them to hope that there are consequences. They are probably also oblivious to the possibility that a non-tenured professor might go through hell with a tenure committee because that student had a bad day and vented on a piece of paper.
Another favorite activity of this particular kind of student is to lash out via the numerical portion of an evaluation form. Given a set of statements and asked to rate the teacher in each area on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest, they skew the numbers by going right down the page and entering straight “ones” all the way down, in most cases without even reading the statements. In a small class, this effectively decimates the professor’s final evaluative point average, but gives the professor absolutely no useful information except “I don’t like you” or “I hate chemistry.”
So why does it hurt? Why even think about a statement like that for more than the .5 seconds it takes to read it? If 32 people tell me I’m boring, I need to take a look at that; but if one person tells me I’m boring and 31 tell me I’m great, why not get a grip and be rational about it? Why is it the case that so many of us simply can NOT put these horrific little poison-pen-wielding characters out of our minds? I know a huge number of my colleagues who have the same experience – even if they know, rationally and logically, that it’s probably not going to cause The End Of Their Career, they still lie there at night wondering why this kid thought that their course, which they spent so much time on and thought so hard about, was a total waste of time. Or why a course that had a carefully-delineated calendar, specific guidelines for every assignment, clear grading criteria, and a logical sequence of lectures was “unorganized.” Or why they thought the TA was “better than the teacher.” Or why person X thinks that Professor Y is “mean,” or that Professor Z treats some students differently than others, when Professor Z knocks himself out to treat everyone the same. (I’m not making this up; these are things that colleagues at various schools have shared with me.)
I think there are several reasons. OK, they’re not necessarily rational; but if we think about the reasons, maybe it will help. Maybe it won’t, and we’ll wake up at 4 am anyhow. I offer the following:
1) It just plain hurts to have mean-spirited comments aimed at you, whether you should pay attention to them or not. This is human nature.
2) Most of us hear and remember criticisms much more acutely than praise or compliments. I don’t know if it’s human nature or if it’s our culture; but it’s a very real phenomenon. This is true even if the criticism is mean-spirited, useless, unconstructive, or just plain untrue. It starts up the inner sound file: you’re a fake, you’re not really very good, you’re inept, blah blah blah. My Buddhist teachers would tell us that this is just one more way for the ego to focus on itself, and of course it is. However, I often wonder why the ego gets so much more stuck on the bad stuff, and doesn’t luxuriate in the other umpteen good comments. (Actually, my Tibetan teachers were mystified by that as well – they told us many times that they had a hard time understanding the culture of self-loathing that seems to be rampant in the west.) My guess is that we are socialized to play down compliments—after all, that would be conceited—and to focus instead on the Puritanical pastime of correcting our numerous and certainly unforgivable faults, which will make us very ‘umble and get us into Hebben much faster.
3) Speaking of Hebben, I think that academia now suffers from a kind of low-grade, pervasive anxiety about disgruntled students, as we experience a rising number of incidents in which some undiagnosed sociopath goes on a shooting spree because he didn’t get into law school. Handing out a deserved F used to be an ethical imperative; but I would be interested to know how many other professors now experience a fleeting vision of a nut with a semi-automatic when they use the F key, or when they read a hateful, mean-spirited evaluation. I suspect that many of us do, but won’t admit it because it somehow feels “cowardly.”
4) Some of us, even when there is an isolated bad evaluation, actually spend time wondering what this person experienced that was different from the majority of the others, and WHY they experienced it. It’s extremely possible that it had nothing to do with us, but there is always the possibility that we didn’t pick up some message, especially from a first-year student who may not know yet how to effectively tell a professor “I’m having a real problem here.” The fact that the evaluations are anonymous (and should be) means that we cannot solve this problem, because we can’t address the student, and in a big class we can’t even begin to guess who it was.
Obviously, I’m not offering a band-aid or a solution, or offering a foolproof way to remain unaffected, because I don’t have one (other than my Buddhist teachers’ suggestion to quit focusing on one’s self all the time.) All you can really do is read the comments, assess whether or not you need to address the issues raised by the negative ones, and then let it go and just continue to do the best you can.
Humor also helps. I suppose it is possible to find some humor in The Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever. One can find it in other examples too: like the person who gave me a very low number in the category of “sticking too strongly to the textbook.” Newsflash, Dude: There was no textbook for that particular class. Another one wrote “Too many student questions.” Well, I guess we’ll have to do away with THAT age-old mode of student-teacher discourse, and Socrates can go to hell. Another one didn’t like the “method in which the information was presented” in a certain class; that was a tough one, since I was a sabbatical “Sub” for Professor X, and was using Professor X’s format, which has historically been very popular. Ironically, another student commented that the class was MUCH better on the couple of days when Professor X came in and taught it (ouchies.). So, apparently Professor X’s method of presenting information is a problem, but the class was much better when Professor X taught it. There’s humor in there somewhere.
Having said all this, my last comment goes out to the students of mine who might be reading this (and I know that some of you do):
I know and honor the fact that most of you use the evaluation forms constructively. I read them all, I think about them all, and I care about them all. And the fact that some people make comments that are hurtful, unthoughtful or wacko does not, and will never, cause me to ignore all the others. Keep saying what’s on your mind—it’s up to us as professors to be able to use your feedback wisely, to get a grip, and to learn how to discern thoughtful criticism from a comment that combines Family Guy Peter Griffin’s logic with Stewie’s delivery.
Now, where are those chocolate cookies? I need one…
