What Delayed Course Evaluations Might — and Might Not — Reveal

Lynn Roche Phillips was grocery shopping one Sunday afternoon when a former student named David stopped her. He told Phillips, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, that he and another former student of hers had recently gotten to talking. And they agreed that her course, which they had taken two semesters earlier, was the most useful and practical one they’d come across.

“David E. made my day that Sunday afternoon,” Phillips wrote in an email. “It sometimes takes time for content to ‘sink in’ with students.”

And, even though the student’s comment won’t count in Phillips’s tenure bid, something deeper took place. “David affirmed that my work has lasting meaning,” she wrote. “And isn’t that what we’re here for?”

Phillips’s story illustrates a deep conviction that is difficult to substantiate but that animates many faculty members’ teaching: that their lessons stick with students long after a course ends. It often takes longer than a semester for knowledge to take root, the thinking goes, so just imagine how much more valuable course evaluations would be if they were delayed.

It was this line of thinking that motivated Raghuveer Parthasarathy, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon, to muse on his blog about conducting evaluations well after a course ends, perhaps even a year later. His idea appeared in The Chronicle’s newsletter, Teaching, and generated comments from about two-dozen readers. While the typical evaluation, conducted at the end of a course, is often derided and distrusted for reflecting various biases, many readers expressed support for Parthasarathy’s idea while also acknowledging that it would be logistically difficult.

“The timing of evaluations has always bothered me,” wrote Emily M. Hill, an associate professor of history at Queen’s University, in Ontario. And it’s especially true, she said, in courses with a substantial final exam. She thought that delaying evaluations for, say, four weeks could enable students to better reflect on what they had learned during the entire course and from the final. In her upper-level courses, as much as 40 percent of the grade is based on a final assignment, but students submit it well after they hand in their course evaluations. “I make detailed comments when assessing these assignments,” she wrote, “and such work is a significant part of my teaching.” But it never gets evaluated by her students.

Later evaluations might also allow colleges to assess student outcomes that can be difficult to measure from a single course. Skills like written or oral communication can be relatively straightforward to evaluate after a course, but attitudinal ones, like global awareness, may take longer to observe, wrote Drew Ferguson, interim director of assessment at Brenau University.

But then again, he wrote, evaluating attitudes like civic engagement later might not exactly solve the problem either. “Say a student gets fired up for a given cause during class and starts volunteering that very semester, but a few semesters go by and that zeal has waned,” he wrote. “In that case, what are we to say of the real, long-term shift in attitude?”

‘Paychecks’ From Students

Most of the delayed feedback that professors receive occurs by happenstance, in individual encounters like the one Phillips described. Faculty clearly cherish these exchanges.

Usha Rao, for example, described how she once received a postcard from two former students who were in Hawaii. A decade later, she can still remember their names.

The students, a man and a woman, had taken Rao’s general-education geology course, “Introduction to Planet Earth” and later married. They’d written to Rao, who is now an associate professor of geochemistry at St. Joseph’s University, while on their honeymoon in Hawaii, where they could see some of the geological phenomena she had taught them. Rao was touched to be thanked years later. “The memory of this,” she wrote, “still makes me smile.”

Another professor keeps such messages and letters in a file marked “paychecks from students.” Mark Matheson, a visiting professor of business at Southern Virginia University, says the messages in that file “give me psychological and emotional nourishment to keep teaching with enthusiasm and effectiveness.”

But a more tangible currency — for both students and professors — can also be generated by messages like these. A few professors described how, after a former student initially contacted them out of the blue to praise their courses, he or she asked them to serve as a reference.

Steve Erfle, a professor of international business and management at Dickinson College, included emails from some alumni from whom he hadn’t heard in decades for his application for promotion, which he shared with The Chronicle. In it, he described a former student’s “aha!” moment, which happened when he was working in an internship in Greece and conducted a regression analysis that Erfle had taught him. “You don’t know what you need to know,” the student said, “until you need to know it.”

Comforting Conclusions

But the most common sentiment among professors who contacted The Chronicle was that soliciting feedback from students long after a course would serve as a kind of vindication, one that would help students appreciate professors they might have once disliked.

“Many years later, a person will almost never talk about a ‘fun’ class he or she took in college,” wrote Donald M. Chance, a finance professor at Louisiana State University. “But they will talk about the classes that pushed them almost over the edge.” Chance speculated that it might be better to follow up with students as many as 20 years after a course. “Then I think I’d hear that my course prepared them for the demanding challenges of their careers,” he wrote.

Some professors base these kinds of ideas on their own experience as students. Earl Mulderink, a professor of history at Southern Utah University, recalled writing negative evaluations of faculty members whose courses he had taken, and fared poorly in, as an undergraduate. But, he wrote, “my evaluations today of those courses would be more objective — and more positive — than what I wrote as an ignorant and unappreciative undergraduate student.”

While it’s comforting to believe that students who render harsh evaluations will come to think better of their “rigorous professor,” wrote Dom Caristi, a professor of telecommunications at Ball State University, it’s usually not true. “Usually, if students think the professor is an ass while they are in the class,” he wrote, “they will still think the professor was an ass years later.”

‘I Really Hated You’

Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent described this sort of comforting belief as a “myth” in a 2008 article in Chemical Engineering Education. “It happens sometimes, but not often,” they wrote.

And this myth appears to have been borne out for many professors.

“I admit I really hated you in 240,” one former student wrote to Duncan A. Buell, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina. “But looking back, it was the course where I learned the most.”

Similarly, K. Jane Grande-Allen, a professor of bioengineering at Rice University, said that many former pre-med students have thanked her years after taking a course called “Extracellular Matrix” because of its emphasis on scientific communication skills.

“Students don’t appreciate it at the time,” she wrote, “but they see the payoff later when they can present their ideas with confidence and skill.”

Feedback from former students, she said, might also have a broader benefit if it can be collected more systematically: It could provide alumni’s perspective on the curriculum as a whole.

A more-complete perspective on the curriculum is one of the most intriguing possibilities of a delayed evaluation, says Ken Ryalls, president of the IDEA Center, a nonprofit organization that conducts evaluations and researches the results. But understanding this fuller picture would be difficult, he said, because the effects of a single course aren’t so easily disaggregated from those of other courses. “If everyone is contributing a little bit,” he said, “then one class won’t be remembered as ‘the class that changed my whole life.’”

Any efforts to systematically survey students after a course would also be inherently complicated, he said. What questions, for example, would you ask? Who would pay for it? Who would administer it? And how realistic is it to expect that students would complete them?

Besides, he said, human memory and perspectives can be tricky things. Even when students do eventually come around to recognizing how valuable a professor’s lessons were, they seldom credit the instructor for teaching them. Instead, a student will tend to discount a professor’s role.

“That’s the way humans work,” he said. The occasional positive anecdote will still occur, he said, “but 99 percent of the time it’s, ‘I hated you — and I still don’t like you.’”

Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.