Student evaluations of teachers are pointless and ineffective

By Michael Sharp

November 16, 2007 | I had my first of many class evaluations today. The scene was familiar. From the more than three years I've been a student at Utah State University I've had plenty of classes with plenty of evaluations to know the routine. After approximately one minute, two thirds of the class had already turned in their evaluation sheet and proceeded to take out their iPods and Statesmans until the rest of the one third, who spend time to think about their evaluation and fill in the comments section, are done.

I've definitely been a member of both groups. Sometimes I've enjoyed racing through the bubbles of excellent, very good, good, fair, and poor, thinking more about the patterns I was making than the effectiveness of the teacher. Other times I've chosen to take my time and divulge my well thought out feedback in the comments section that I have been pondering about for the entire semester. Sometimes I do a combination of both, but either way I feel like my evaluations of my teachers and courses are pointless.

I decided to see if my experience was representative of the entire university when I found this gem of a website. It shows all the scores of evaluations for all the teachers for every class since I've been here. It showed that overall as a university the class and teacher receive an average evaluation of very good.

I then dug deeper and totaled the scores for my top three and bottom three most effective classes. I found that their evaluations differed by .1 percent. I am confident that if more students took these assessments seriously, these scores would look very different.

So why don't most students take evaluations seriously? Is the Statesman so terribly interesting that students are too riveted by the Police Blotter or Caught on Campus that they can't focus on anything else? Maybe, but I think that part of this problem goes back to our elementary school days.

I remember back in my days of public education, the teacher would promise us candy for good behavior during assessments. The assistant principal would come into the class while we would be sitting quiet in our desks waiting for the evaluator to leave so that we could eat candy and raise havoc again. These evaluations were sure to be skewed based on our out of norm model behavior, and the teacher's extra preparation for the day. We knew it, and I think this instilled in at least me a sense of unimportance to teacher evaluations.

Another major barrier to students taking evaluations more seriously is the little effect it seems to have in their life. Teachers don't seem to take evaluations to heart, and little is changed year to year in the classroom based on evaluations. Even if the teacher does take the evaluation to heart, at the end of the year, it is too late for the teacher's changes to affect you. The very best course evaluation I had was when the teacher gave a mandatory survey on WebCT where we were supposed to make comments on the course. He then read some of the feedback in class and genuinely seemed to make an effort to improve based on our comments.

Although I'm not a teacher, and don't exactly have their vantage point, I am surrounded by them. Not only is my wife a teacher, but I also come from a pedigree of primary, secondary, and higher education teachers. My mom for example was an elementary school teacher, who recently received her PhD in educational psychology and is currently working for BYU (I can't say that I am terribly proud of the fact that my Mom is employed by the university which is commonly referred to in Logan as, "that other blue school"). In a recent phone interview with her she described the problem like this, "Most students just hurry to get their evaluations done. They don't care and don't understand the value of them." She went on to say, "another problem is that you can't get away from bias in evaluations. Some teachers who are more charismatic are going to get high marks, where other teachers who rub a student the wrong way will get lower scores."

I would assume that even teachers don't take evaluations very seriously, and justifiably so since students don't take them seriously, which in turn creates more reason for students to not take them seriously. It seems like an ever-degenerative cycle.

I'm sure that there is someone somewhere taking these evaluations seriously or they wouldn't spend the time and money to waste so much paper and class time to afflict us with these assessments. I imagine the dean of the college, or head of the department, who praises or scolds teachers based on their performance evaluation, takes them seriously. But should they since neither teacher nor student puts much weight on them?

Both my Mom and I agree that there need to be improvements on how student evaluations are conducted to ensure a representative response is given by the students and steady improvement is made by the teachers. My mom said, "there needs to be constant improvement in evaluations so that they are organized in a way that guides students to say what they really think."

Until there is a better system for teacher evaluations, every semester at the end of the term, we will continue to waste our time with a largely meaningless ritual.

NW
MS