It’s the last day of class, there are five minutes left,
and your professor just passed out class evaluations. Your sweetie
is waiting for you at Rubio’s, and you are really craving
some fish tacos. So you scribble in the bubbles on the front of the
form, flip it over, scrawl “Get a new hairpiece,” and
leave the class in a flurry.
That may sound ridiculous to some, but actually, one friend
relayed the story of a student who wrote the
“hairpiece” quip on an evaluation to me.
I bet most students can recall a similarly droll remark
they’ve included on an evaluation. But amusing anecdotes
aside, there is a problem with the class evaluations when comments
like this show up.
In a Dec. 6 Daily Bruin story about making class evaluations
available to students, UCLA administrators voiced their faith in
the evaluations. When asked whether making the evaluations
available to students would dilute their value, Arnold Scheibel,
the chairman for the Committee on Teaching, and Barbara Geddes,
vice chairwoman of the political science department, both said
students take the evaluations seriously and making them available
to students would not change the quality of the evaluations.
Scheibel, Geddes and other administrators at UCLA are sadly
mistaken if they think a number UCLA students take class
evaluations seriously. Some students use the evaluations to vent
about professors and TAs they dislike, and if students enjoy their
instructors, they give little thought to the superlatives they
quickly scribble on the back of the evaluations before scurrying
out of class. (Some even leave as the evaluations are being handed
out.)
“People write truthfully if they are very pleased or very
upset with a class, so the results get skewed,” fourth-year
mathematics student Adam Hirsch believes.
While some may debate whether class evaluations should be made
available to students, that discussion is moot until the evaluation
process is modified so that students’ evaluations become more
meaningful assessments of their classes.
“The evaluations are a bad way to keep tabs on
professors,” fourth-year aerospace engineering student Nick
Martin said. “Students care more about getting out of class
than writing evaluations. When a teacher leaves 20 minutes early
and tells students to do evaluations, students do it in five
minutes and leave.”
Other UCLA students echoed Martin’s sentiment. I took an
informal survey of students in a discussion section as they filled
out evaluations of a TA. Only nine of the 18 students surveyed said
that they took the evaluations seriously. While this survey is not
representative of the student populace, other informal questioning
led me to believe that many students think the evaluations are,
well, a joke.
“I was convinced one professor came to class drunk, so in
my evaluation I told him he shouldn’t come to class
trashed,” fourth-year chemistry student Matt Susnow said.
The problem is, while students do not take the evaluations
seriously, professors and TAs do. Philip Potter, a political
science graduate student and TA, said he uses the evaluations
“as a proving ground for teaching strategies that I’m
employing for the first time.”
Potter said he takes students’ comments in the evaluations
to heart. That seems to be the case across the board ““ from
professors to entire departments.
“My department takes the evaluations seriously in writing
up reports for merit increases and promotion to tenure and full
professor,” history professor Stephen Aron said. “We
always include a section on teaching, in which the numerical
ratings are discussed and comments are often excerpted. I’ve
always read the comments closely. Although I’m less concerned
about occasional comments that the readings were too long and too
dry, I do worry if numbers of students complain that I’ve
talked too fast ““ I do ““ and that I haven’t made
myself understood.”
There are a few things that can be done to improve the in-class
evaluations. First, students should rein in their griping.
Professors and TAs say they do take the comments seriously, so
it’s possible the insight students offer will improve
classes.
“Students should be realistic about what they comment
on,” Potter said. “Many complaints refer to things that
TAs and even faculty have no control over, and are therefore
ignored. However, a comment on the merits of a particular
assignment or a specific suggestion on how to improve the course is
very likely to get incorporated.”
The quality of the evaluations could also be improved if
instructors tried to make it seem like they cared about the
evaluations. Usually, instructors are rather blasé about the
whole affair, and that doesn’t inspire students to put in any
effort.
“If it’s apparent that the professor or TA
doesn’t care what students write in the evaluations, students
will think that it’s a formality and will not write
much,” political science graduate student and TA Paul Osher
said. “When I was an undergrad, I surely did that more often
than not. Before I pass out my evaluations, I beg my students to
take them seriously and the result is that there are only a few
that don’t write comments.”
Most importantly, something needs to be done about the timing of
the evaluations. It’s unreasonable to expect students to
thoughtfully complete evaluations on the last day of class, during
the last minutes of lecture.
“Perhaps we should find a different way to have
evaluations completed than as is usually the case ““ at the
end of the last lecture, when students are less likely to hang
around and write extensive commentary,” Aron said.
Evaluations could be done eighth week, before the stresses of
finals have begun to distract students, but at a time when students
can fairly assess their classes. It’s hard to think of
something nice to say about a professor on Friday of week 10, when
you know you will be spending Saturday and Sunday studying for a
Monday final.
Come to think of it, I need to get back to studying, which has
been forced upon me by “cruel” professors.
E-mail Miller at [email protected].