First Person

Evaluation Anticipation

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By John Lemuel

It's that time of year again when student evaluations from the previous semester start to wend their way back to their recipient faculty members. At my college, the evaluations are sent off-site for processing, and the summary report has to cross several administrators' desks before it reaches mine. The result is a period of limbo that sometimes stretches past spring break. I've learned to live with any suspense associated with the delay.

The quickest turnaround time for student evaluations was back in graduate school when I was a teaching assistant. The form had an optical scan portion with standard questions at the top, and lines below for written comments. Office staff members processed the forms immediately and put the results in our boxes by early January, with a numerical summary sheet atop the originals, allowing us to read the comments in the students' own scrawl.

I remember pulling the routing envelope from my mailbox like a forgotten Christmas present fallen behind the couch. What pleasant surprise might be waiting inside?

The actual contents often dashed expectations: either the disappointing damnation of faint praise, or worse, the stinging slap of insult and abuse. One of the most memorable came from a student who wrote simply, "Shave that godawful beard." Granted, the beard was pretty godawful that semester, but could I please get a more substantive critique?

Some results were perplexing: A student once wrote that I "would make a great prof," but proceeded to give me straight zeros on the performance objectives. Maybe the student considered all professors useless blowhards, and decided I was that in spades. Or perhaps the student truly thought I was wonderful, but wasn't bright enough to figure out the simple numeric scale, casting doubt on the endorsement.

The rapid turnaround time for those evaluations was a mixed blessing. Constructive suggestions came soon enough to incorporate in the planning for the next semester. But criticism came while the memory of the class was still fresh. Maybe I still felt defensive about a disgruntled student's complaint, especially when I saw the whole case repeated in a more strident tone. Sometimes I could still recognize some of the students' handwriting from grading their in-class work all semester. A month or so later and my recollections would have been less acute, with the new semester in full swing.

My Christmas-morning eagerness soon faded, and I put off opening the packet of evaluations for a couple weeks, a month, eventually a whole semester. Doing so made them more of a gift. I found myself more likely to feel grateful and think, now there's a suggestion I can use.

The negative responses felt fewer and smaller, the work of a couple dissatisfied customers. If I could recall the disgruntled student, I did so with the neutrality of time and distance. I realized that when I read them more promptly, I let the negative comments weigh disproportionately in my mind to overshadow the whole class.

From my first semester as a TA, one student's evaluation, in particular, made a lasting impression. The student complained that I had told the class on the first day I did not care about the course or the subject matter because it wasn't my specialty and I didn't want to teach it.

I did not actually say the words alleged, but I know what gave rise to that interpretation. I was leading a small section of a large lecture survey course. All of my undergraduate coursework (other than my own huge freshman survey course) had a different geographical and temporal emphasis. So I felt the need to begin the class with a disclaimer: After reading the course description, I added that I was not exactly qualified to teach it, either by prior training or current research interest. Caveat emptor: Buyer beware.

I think my intention was to lower their expectations, for fear of personal failure: "Well what did you expect? You're studying this topic with the wrong guy."

But the effect of my comment on at least one student was to communicate apathy or even derision about the course. The lesson I learned: Regardless of your private misgivings, never suggest to your students that you shouldn't be teaching the course. You don't want them to agree with you, so why plant the seed of doubt in the first place?

Another observation I made as a TA leading discussion sections was the inverse relationship between my own popularity and that of the faculty member leading the whole course. With a faculty member who rambled incoherently half the time and inaudibly most of the time, my discussion section became a welcome oasis. And my evaluations soared as a result.

At the time I basked in the affirmation, but now, as I juggle multiple courses -- some new and some surveys that I have taught more times than I can remember -- I find it hard to be brilliant all the time in the classroom. I've have to downgrade my opinion of my early teaching career. As a TA, I had a fraction of the students for a fraction of the time, and thus no excuse not to do a decent job.

But TAs don't always get the credit they deserve, as I discovered while teaching with Dr. Popularity. One way that some faculty members boost their appeal is by turning the tables and mocking the TAs. Usually teaching assistants are the students' ally, by virtue of being younger and more accessible than the professor.

But Dr. Popularity played for students' affections and won. When equipment failed, he joked that a TA must have messed it up. Privately assuring us we could take a week or 10 days to grade the exams, he would then ask in lecture when we were ever going to get them back to students.

Dr. P even had his own special evaluation form: Using a one-to-five scale, he would ask students to evaluate him, then their TA, and finally the course overall, with room for comments beneath. He had the results tabulated before our last team meeting. Unsurprisingly the course rated average, he rated high, and the TAs rated low. That's not bad, he would say, one day we might rate as high as he did -- presumably when we could use his methods against TAs of our own.

My career progressed from TA to adjunct to visiting assistant professor at another institution. The department was mostly senior professors, with regular turnover in the permanent visiting professor's slot.

My predecessor was inexperienced and ineffective, asked to leave and advised to change careers. Within a semester or two students were telling each other to take my class. The circumstances made it easy to get good buzz going. Following a visitor from Mars, and being Bono in a Lawrence Welk department certainly helped.

After a couple years of visiting appointments, I landed a tenure-track job in a small department elsewhere, only to suffer the indignity of following on the heels of ... well, me, only more so.

My predecessor -- a fresh young fellow who had replaced a Kennedy-era hire -- didn't assign many books, digressed frequently into politics and contemporary culture debates, and held extra office hours at the students' bar of choice.

By comparison I seemed terribly old-fashioned and out of date. My evaluations went from superlative at my previous job to excoriating at the new one.

That reminded me of a pearl of wisdom I once heard from a professor I deeply respect: If you're half as good as your admirers think, and half as bad as your detractors say, then you're probably doing all right. My negative ratings gradually faded along with the memory of Dr. Fun Times.

Eventually I got the satisfaction of hearing a student complain she hadn't learned anything before I came. Today, students who have never heard of him now fill my classes.

I've started introducing the topic of student evaluations early in the semester, mainly to point out the folly of saving up grievances to unload anonymously after grades are in. I can't deal with problems I don't know about, and finding out about them sometime next semester won't help the students currently afflicted. So I tell students, try talking to me, and see if we can't resolve the problem. If I help some learn how to be a self-advocate in the process, that's a plus.

But I know I won't appeal to every student, so I ask them to write only comments they could sign their names to, and some actually do. I point out that anonymous denunciations have all of the courage and none of the effectiveness of a drive-by shooting. Some of the denunciations I keep for my own amusement in a folder labeled "Student Hall of Shame." The rest get pitched. I am as free to ignore them as they are to write them.