Pointlife
Professor evaluations show a variety of student opinions
The Pointer
nmeye177@uwsp.edu
Class evaluations have become an expected part of the end of a semester. It’s the first chance students get to sit on the other side of the red pen, or pencil in this case, and give an evaluation of their instructors’ performance. Some take this task more seriously then others, but for those who do, the system may be less effective then desired. Students are given a lot of room for interpretation on the evaluations, but this could be exactly the problem.
“They should know what they’re evaluating,” said psychology professor Dr. Justin Rueb.
Dr. Rueb has worked with performance appraisals in both the Air Force and business sector for around six years.
“If you’re in business, one of the things you’re supposed to do with your managers is have training,” said Rueb. “If you have evaluations or performance appraisals, you’re supposed to inform the managers of what they’re looking for and how to actually fill out and use the form.”
At the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, after-class evaluations are completed; then they are turned in to be scored. After scored and after students’ grades for the semester have to professors, given to department heads and the chancellor so they can see how students have reacted to a professor’s teaching.
The results are presented without individual student information in the form of a frequency distribution, meaning professors see how many people gave each rating for each question, for each class. The information is used in a variety of ways.
“We have to include all of our student evaluations every time we go up for some sort of promotion or tenure, and every single number goes through our department chair. They go to the dean; they go to the chancellor; they go to the vice chancellor and the numbers are reviewed at each of those steps,” said psychology professor Dr. Craig Wendorf.
Dr. Wendorf was part of the committee, which included faculty and students, that put together the old version of the class evaluation form. The new version was put together after a movement to improve the evaluations.
Questions were decided by looking at what faculty at the time thought was relevant and the piles of research done on the subject. The committee created a form they felt would be useful. The original form was on scale from one to five with five being “strongly agree,” and the committee pushed to get students more aware of the class evaluations for a more effective process.
“One of the recommendations the committee made those seven years ago, was that there should be a consorted push to get students more involved, more interested in understanding them,” said Dr. Wendorf. “There were many discussions about many possible methods. Because student involvement on the committee was less than consistent, ideas about implementation were not included back then.”
Now students are working with an instrument that may or may not be fully serving its purpose without better student understanding, as well as a scale that works opposite of the way people normally think about things.
“From a human factors perspective and the way people view the world, one is typically associated with the lower portion of something, so ‘strongly disagree’ is typically one and ‘strongly agree’ is five,” said Dr. Rueb. “I’ve been told many times by students that they sometimes revert and think five is higher.”
Many other problems can arise with evaluations, especially when the evaluators aren’t trained to understand the process. What’s known as “the halo effect” is one of these problems.
“The one that you see right away is the halo effect; if you like an instructor, you tend to rate them higher in every area,” said Dr. Rueb.
Students aren’t trained in the process of filling out evaluations, having them critique a professor right before the class ends may be the biggest problem.
“You need to train the people that are using the instrument; we don’t train students on what critiquing is,” said Dr. Rueb.
Speaking with students, many feel these evaluations are very important and that they should be taken seriously, seriously enough to warrant deeper understanding of the process. Some students also expressed a need for access to the information to help determine what professors they’d like to have class with rather than relying on Web sites like ratemyprofessor.com.
“This is the one chance you really have, for students to show what teachers are good teachers or aren’t good teachers,” said UW-SP senior Chad Flanders.
The form as it is now is still an accurate way to determine how professors are performing, according to Dr. Wendorf. But a little more understanding on the part of students could go a long way in making the process more effective.
“I take this pretty serious,” said senior Kenny Fayas. “We pay a lot of money.”
