I just received the statistics on my course evaluations. My return rate, using the web-based system, was 47% (over 50 students). I guess that's not so bad, considering how bad it could have been. My overall rating (the only number that really counts) was a 4.6 on a 5 point scale, about at the 75th percentile for similar courses around the university.
LSU has a set of boilerplate questions that I have never modified, including "well organized," "well prepared," "interested in helping students," etc. For the most part my ratings were positive, as they always are. What has me scratching my head are the two students who ranked me as low as they possibly could on every single item, even the "interested in teaching" one.
Who are you guys? Were you even in my class? How could you have gone to even one lecture and come away with the idea that I wasn't interested in helping you or teaching you? If you knew which car was mine, would you key it? What keeps you from spray-painting my office door? Why don't you just head over to ratemyprofessor.com? I hear they don't have enough of your kind of people over there.
Monday, December 19, 2005
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7 comments:
I would bet a bar of chocolate that those two students failed to read the directions and inverted the evaluation scale. Chin up, Angry Prof.
Funny you should say that. That's what I decided to believe!
It's a known issue with some evaluation scales. But it's also not unusual for dissatisfied students to express it this way, and it does have a disproportionate effect on the numbers. Some schools have been shifting away from averages to "percentage who agree or strongly agree" or something similar.
've always thought they should report two numbers- the raw averages and the averages after trimming the top and bottom 1% to deal with outliers.
In a small class, one or two disgruntled students can torch your numbers.
I put a semester delay on reading evaluations . . . it doesn't bug me so much to see responses like that after I'm involved in the next semester's classes.
Usually, I lurk, but I just got my evals today, too. Like ibeth, I don't read them until the next semester. If I taught the same class, I would, but since none of my four classes repeat, I have basically a year until I teach the class I was evaluated in again.
I also don't pay much attention to them--either the praise or the blame. I really should; I am an assistant professor and my department does care (even though I am at a research university, our school director makes a big deal out of teaching). But...I just remember when I was a student filling them out carelessly and thoughtlessly, and often not at all because I thought the questions were inane even then. So I look for comments about stuff I can control. Last spring everybody hated the book, for example. That's something I can deal with. Comments that I am too fat...well, that's advice I can get anywhere.
I think you rock, if it's any consolation.
Thanks Lisa.
I feel better about this, and silly that I took it so seriously.
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