To the Editor:
Your article, “Colleges Are Getting Smarter About Student Evaluation. Here’s How” (The Chronicle, January 13), may indicate that colleges and universities are paying more attention to the issue of student evaluations, but there is no indication that they are doing anything that makes them more valid or valuable for professors. There is also no indication that they are making them less strategic for professors who understandably use them to bolster a portfolio for retention, promotion, and tenure.
I have been teaching for over four decades at Towson University and have been on its main legislative body for nearly four decades. I have received high teaching evaluations throughout that period with few if any exceptions, but I have never thought I was an effective teacher because of my high ratings.
The best professor I had in my graduate and undergraduate days told a few of us graduate students that he would, days before student evaluations, give an easy test, apologize to students for giving them such a difficult test, and compliment them lavishly for their surprisingly excellent performance, a performance which proved how well they had processed the material from their class. This endeavor yielded predictably high evaluations.
He related this story humorously, but the lesson was earnest.
On a few specific points in the article:
• Online evaluations, unless invalidated by threats of grade withholding, in contrast with in-class evaluations, encourage polarized and smaller numbers of respondents. At Towson, many classes have gone from 90 percent-plus to 20-30 percent response rate.
• The use of midterm evaluations is primarily a craven way to bolster evaluations. Student dissatisfaction is no reason to change the method or content of a course. If a professor finds that a teaching strategy does not yield student understanding, he or she will infer that quite easily in class discussion and by intermittent testing.
• The notion that there is a way to eliminate biases — specifically, gender, racial, and ethnic biases — is a fool’s errand. First of all, there is an inexhaustible number of biases that affect student evaluations and student learning, including a professors’ personality, humor, age, height, class size, physical comfortability, and a multitude of other factors. There is no way to eliminate such biases anymore than there is a way to eliminate such factors in the choice of a lifelong mate. Moreover, if a student isn’t learning from a professor, why does it help to make salient to students demographic or other factors that may create a self-fulfilling prophesy effect in their learning?
• There is a small percentage of students in each class who have the wherewithal to provide valuable insights, but when contaminated by know-nothings, special pleaders, and personal biases, in the aggregate they are of limited value at best.
The fact is that every couple of years, scholars and others will come up with new “answers” on how to make student evaluations more valid and important, but they cannot do so. Use student evaluations for retention, promotion, and tenure, but use them tenuously only.
Richard E. Vatz
Professor of Rhetoric and Communication
Towson University
Towson, Md.
