Wouldn’t some griping about grading on official evaluations be par for the course? I imagine that no matter what we do, those students on the lower end will claim we did not sufficiently prepare them. It sounds as though you did all that you could in the scenario, short of phoning each student personally and reminding them to check the LMS!

I’ve felt like pulling my hair out when this happens to me. It is incredibly frustrating and I’ve had to respond to these inaccurate comments in annual reviews, too. I’ve also included assignment handouts and rubrics in my file to reveal that I do supply students with this information.

It is also clear to me that these narratives about faculty not providing enough information about assignments, etc. circulate among students in a class and the students validate each other by accepting these narratives. If you happen to teach multiple sections of the same course, you could point to evaluations of other sections if students in those sections do no have the same complaints.

This is also frustrating (perhaps even more so) on the job market. You have quantitative evals that look poor, but qualitative comments that reveal the mediocre scores are due to a “misunderstanding” of how the class was actually conducted. Any discussion of how things really played out sounds defensive or whiny.

I plan on keeping this post and thread on file. I like the idea of having an informal survey before the end of the quarter as well. I might try that.

sahmphd: I like the idea of bringing up other sections’ comments, too. In my case, the most recent evaluation batch had a comment about how a student emailed me and I didn’t respond. I’m one of those teachers who DOES get back to students almost immediately. I teach online, I’m even available via text message, and don’t mind the 24 hour nature of online teaching. I *thought* I made clear that if they don’t hear back from me in 24 hours, it’s possible the spam filter caught it, or it might have gotten buried in my email under all the “reply alls” that faculty/staff sometimes do.

I have been able to cut down on incorrect evaluations (and getting students to read the instructions more) by implementing a syllabus test worth very few points at the beginning of the quarter. This also serves the purpose of having them go through a timed test before the first real one comes along. I get many fewer emails about things they could have looked up on their own.

To some of the other posters: This is an issue that really does have to be taken seriously. The days of “the professor is always right” are gone, and there is more pressure to please the student than in the past. Not all departments rely so heavily on evaluations, but some do. So, when a student clearly indicates that they’ve got something wrong, I agree that you should have a copy of the syllabus/assignment instructions attached to it in your file. I haven’t yet done this, but I’ll make sure to do this in the next batch, since this appears to be larger problem than I thought.

In my administrative days, I always encouraged faculty members to consider writing a memo to the file. It might be something like “the five people in the back of the room were consistently disruptive regardless of my best efforts” or “tried a new book, what a disaster”. In this case, writing a proactive statement about steps taken to communicate the rubric along with the frustration that students won’t use the LMS might be sufficient. At the very least, if a chair were reviewing the verbatims (which must always be read with a large grain of salt) and asked for a response, something would exist that wasn’t written as a purely defensive document.

I long ago learned that students often fail to inform themselves by reading material which covers class organizational detail, and will subsequently complain of not having been informed. Gone are the days when you could expect to cover that kind of stuff at the beginning of the term and show them (once) how to get to it (or that you passed out to them way back when). I head off this kind of potential problem by simply reiterating at the beginning or end of most classes things that are looming on the horizon and refer them to where the detail is posted (usually bringing it up on line yet again for them to see me do it). As a critical date nears, I put a bit more emphasis on the reminders, since there always are students who for whatever reason are absent or absorbed in something else during class. That being said, there will always be a small number of students who for whatever reason will use an end of term course questionnaire (I refuse to call a customer satisfaction survey an evaluation) as an opportunity to blame their own failings on the instructor.

But “upward” evaluation is much more threatening. Even in these days of “power to the student”, it is still the instructor who has the most power in this relationship, making students feel more vulnerable in providing feedback.

Adjuncts may not have this option. I don’t have a “file” or annual review in which I can correct misinformation. I do, however, get administrative feedback and salary consideration based on the evaluations. So what’s an adjunct to do? There’s nothing built in that allows me to defend myself if necessary. I may not even know the administration’s reaction, though I do see the evaluations, of course, and could write a response if I deem appropriate. It just seems petty all around. Seems like admin should be taking some spoonsful of salt when they read student comments.

My LMS platform (Desire to Learn) allows you to track files the students open by date/time. This is really helpful for you as an instructor (“only have of you have viewed the rubric as of today”).

That surveys are surveys of “opinion” in the sense of “a personal belief or judgment that is not founded on proof or certainty” gives them the precondition of potential bias. Students, make no mistake, have a conflict of interest: they want high grades and are not always willing to work for them. My surprise that a student might make an irrelevant if not purely false comment may mark me as either naive, new to the profession, in an environment which overvalidates “opinions,” or some combination thereof. Additionally, don’t we err if we believe there may be some kind of way to “keep incorrect information from making it into evaluations in the first place” in order that we hear only that which we wish to hear? Control of information is nothing new. I do not think we are able to so control what is correct or incorrect information/misinformation under circumstances conducive to free solicitation of anonymous opinion as are student opinion surveys. As eecraig and megaphone have indicated there are limitations if not flaws in the system which are widely recognized and which often make the information provided by such surveys questionable at best. Perhaps we might better think of surveys as “informative,” in the sense of not just of how well we are doing, but also informative as to the kind and caliber of students we work with: survey information says as much about them as it does about ourselves and our teaching. Even using opinions as “formative” definitely does not necessarily mean that we are to adjust our teaching to them. A “formative” survey can also mean the very opposite–that we refuse to adjust our teaching in light of received opinion when we believe that academic standards would be compromised. One would be on a slippery slope to adjust what one does as a teacher in the classroom merely in light of “the slings and arrows of outrageous opinion.” Hopefully our investment in these opinions is not because administrations or colleagues are holding us hostage to opinion as a substitute for enlightened reasoning but because we honor at some level a certain amount of anonymous grousing as well as valid feedback. Telling the difference is the difficult part. Hopefully the informed know that playing to the crowd is a sure way to foster low-level behaviors unbecoming of that crowd–or becoming, depending on the crowd. This is not what we are about in education. What to do in the face of blatantly incorrect “information” or misinformation hiding behind anonymity? When systems agree to such mechanisms for feedback as anonymous surveys they require perpetual reminders as to the scope and limitations of the very instrument they implemented. Unfortunately this becomes a losing battle. When student opinion surveys were first implemented, no one spoke of student as “customer.” Now that they do so speak, it is time to reconsider this mechanism for its validity is in question.

This one is easy. I gave short answer reading quizzes that counted toward the grade. The syllabus was a reading assignment. So were the assignment memos. Any problem, I pulled out the syllabus or assignment memo and the respective quiz. The boss walked out in a Huff (an ancient movement machine).
After a few years, they quit paying attention to student opinions like those cited. (It helped that the biggest grant funding grabbers were awful teachers. Nobody wanted to mess with the money makers.)

It was a disservice that I would not be party to when teaching (I’m retired). I knew and called on each student by name from the first day of a class. I also let them know that I would be distributing a carefully constructed self-evaluation sheet that were required from students, which were not anonymous, along with the required evaluations administered by the college before turning in a grade. On this sheet a student was required to give him or herself a grade, and the reasons for this assessment. Two weeks prior to the end of the semester, I handed out the my self-evaluation sheets. They were not due, nor accepted, until turning in the final notebook and portfolio or work due at the end of the semester deadline. I also told students at the beginning of a semester/term, that I did not give much credibility to anonymous messages considering the source. That I was prepared to discuss any question or position directly and privately, if desired, and expected the same consideration. That I did not read the written statements attached to the statistical evaluations administered by the college because they were anonymous. If someone wanted to tell me something, they were welcome to do so. At the beginning of each class I used to sum up what was due and going on for class, and what upcoming due dates were to be, as well as having them written out on handouts/ along with any modified due dates (possibly later, never earlier). I used to make the analogy that a grade in my area (ceramics, drawing) was comparable to a grade in physics, to make my point early on. I gave grades that were earned, and was considered a tough, but fair grader. It worked well for me.

Oh, just reading that has me pulling my hair out. As others have noted, I’ve just written (sometimes extensive) comments in my annual report. But, yes, it makes me crazy when an evaluation contains something that is flat-out wrong, whether by the student’s oversight or intent…

I am not a fan of “policing” students, but to counteract falsehoods of this nature I would suggest a precise annotated syllabus that describes the delivery of all information. This would provide proof in the form of a class record that the document was circulated or made available on a given day.

I know of some colleagues who also make use of a written contract or online check-in system to establish that students are staying on-point with all material. After a student has signed-off on receipt they are much less likely to make accusations of this sort.

Bottom-line: Students lie. Often. Everyone knows that. Instructors need to create paper-trails to cover their backs. Faculty and administration should form a solid position from which to deal with these spurious accusations. And stick to it.

You told the students there was a rubric. You didn’t tell them what it contained. You left them to investigate that for themselves, and many of them didn’t do it. They made a bet that their understanding of project expectations was aligned with yours.

What would I do in the situation you described?

There’s nothing else you can do at this point to keep the comment off the official evaluations. You can only use it as a problem to attempt to solve next time.

If there is likely to be a gap between student and instructor expectations, which I usually discover only with experience, then talking explicitly about my expectations is the solution. As someone mentioned earlier, paper handouts get their attention. I am on a strict copying budget and have hundreds of students, so I can’t do that. But if you can, do it. Going through an assignment (or rubric) together in class will help them remember it. Memory requires time spent on the task.

My experience tells me that without explicit, repeated communication, messages don’t get through. I don’t think this is because they don’t care. I think it’s because contemporary college culture entails a norm of a number of hours per week that is inadequate for effective learning, because they are distracted by their jobs and families, and because they have to deal with 4 other instructors every semester who have different systems for interacting with them and for evaluating their work. So they bet that they know what they’re doing, and they’re sometimes wrong.

If your goal is to get students to understand the rubric, go over it together in class. You can also make their completing a version of it part of the assignment. If you want to remind them when they get their graded rubric that they had it to work from while preparing the assignment, include that information on the rubric itself.

I realize that this approach grates on some people because their philosophy is that students should know, or seek out what they don’t know. My approach is more pragmatic.

You can’t anticipate and eliminate every source of misunderstanding. You can only work to reduce misunderstandings in priority areas.

I also wonder, though, if some of the “unclear expectations” objection is rationalization. I had a group of honors students last year who claimed I didn’t give any feedback on their papers when feedback was actually extensive–but these were also the students who argued that honors courses should help them maintain their GPAs. I’ve never gotten the “no feedback” complaint from any other (non-honors) class, most of which are four or five times the size of that class so feedback is more limited. The complaint may be related more to my grading than to feedback; that might be what’s going on with your students, too. If that’s the case, then removing one potential objection may have limited effect. Emphasizing feedback for me, or the rubric for you, will clear away only one rationalization point. The underlying objection will cause a new complaint to emerge, attached to something else. I hope I’m wrong about that.

Since interpretation of the instrument is crucial, the best thing to do is make any person interpreting the instrument feel its shortcomings. One great way to do this is to subject the person interpreting the instrument to the same sort of instrument and the same sort of protocols for interpretation for the same sort of stakes (high or low). So, for instance, administrators should be “evaluated” every single semester by every single faculty member, and faculty leaders should interpret the results and make high or low stakes decisions based upon the evaluations, according to how student evaluations are used in relation to professors.

I learned yrs ago to have students sign a contract day 1 after we did the syllabus/course overview. It basically says ‘I attest that I understand all this and that no @#$%ing will emanate from my lips…or pen’.

Try it. Having the stack of signed contracts posted in my office provided an easy redirect when they griped. The more I used this contractual approach the less the finger-pointing (at me) arose.

I agree with jbechtold–we can’t assume we’ve done our job by simply posting the assignment info/rubrics and expecting the students to see them. on *multiple* occasions in class and via email or blackboard we need to remind them of their responsibility for that information. I tell my students that if they want to be viewed as adults they should act like them–to take responsibility and not blame someone else if they failed to read the readily-available directions after my reminders to do so. We can minimize this problem and many others like it by explicitly and frequently pushing our students more often to do their job.

But if you still get hammered in course evals–and you probably will by some–all you can do is explain it in your review document and show the paper trail of your work (sending emails to class with reminders of key issues–in addition to telling them in class–is helpful because that creates a paper trail). If you’re getting nailed with these kinds of unfair comments on evals it’s safe to assume that other faculty (the ones on your review committees) get nailed it for it in their courses, too. The review committee should be able to dismiss the problem if the criticism comes from a small minority and you have that paper trail.

Of course, whether review committees are fair and act in a reasonable way is an issue for a whole ‘nother column!

There’s really nothing that can be done. An administrator reading the evaluations has to use some judgment. The faculty member should be allowed to respond. I’ve had students say things that were just flat out lies. Claims were made that I didn’t return exams, that I didn’t give them a chance to ask questions about the exam, and the like. Pure BS.

In one case a student claimed I didn’t have office hours. This was obvious BS, and it was easy to verify from my syllabus and the list held by the department secretary. It’s up to the administrator to investigate unfortunately and many are too lazy.

When students are in the grip of acute anxiety about passing, getting credit, moving on–a teacher who stands in their way by challenging them in a course they thought would be easy, is seen as a threat and the student’s evaluation will be a reflection of that perception. Evaluations are designed to quantify the unquantifiable: quality, but they default to popularity pure and simple. Teaching effectiveness is not a function of niceness or giving A’s, but that is often what the evaluations are reporting. Otherwise, the administrator who is looking both below, to the teacher, and above, to their own superiors reading unflattering comments, is caught in the same quandary as the student: the teacher as moderator of subject and experience, or the teacher as inconvenient obstacle to great departmental statistics. The teacher, being human and to avoid being canned, knows that his or her career is at stake and will conform to the tacit expectations of students and administrators and opt for popularity over conent. “Everybody else is getting a 95 in the class and I’m just so confused by all your requirement,” cries the student, and our teacher caves. If students need to vent and the convenient instrument is the evaluation, that’s one thing, but there has to be a way for adminsitrators to document that a teacher is effective or not.
Possibly, and I cringe to think of this: department heads should sit in (or log into) at least 10% of the class time and see whether the class is any good, see whether the teacher teaches. But there isn’t enough time in the day, says the administrator. Administrators are masters at cloaking motives and if a course, face-to-face or online, is a cash cow they will not be honest about it and hire Watson the “Jeopardy” computer to teach it, but the idea must be attractive. It must not come down to message vs marketing because teachers will inevitably lose if the choice is save money or improve quality.
Just maybe higher education is a matter of motivation and preparation and energy and delivering the goods, and some students are going to fall by the wayside. If colleges and universities will not step up and spend time and money on the ugly process of remediating what the nation’s high schools–holding tanks or day-care centers for today’s for teens—cannot do; and if the choice is between funding that new sports arena or maintaining some standards, then the choice is clear: a nation of ignoramuses. Or maybe administrators might occasionally have to err on the side of quality, roll up their sleeves, judge the education happening at their institutions first-hand instead of depending on evaluations.

Although I don’t know how many of my colleagues would agree, I give my students a lot of credit, at least when several of them say the same thing. I doubt Professor Whitney’s students were “plain wrong.” When that many students tell me the same thing, I have to go back and say, ask, How good a job did I do at communicating something? Even if my students know what a “rubric” is (educational jargon word), I follow the assumption that most people in marketing do, that most people (myself included), don’t always pick up on something the first time I see it or hear it.

I believe the subtext of Professor Whitney’s student feedback was, “Don’t just tell us something important once or twice or in just one way and expect we’ll all get it the first time.”

Welcome to the face book age of on-line student evaluations. A two week window for completion by student virtually insures that I will give a test during the open evaluation time. Students unhappy with their grade like to unload on the professor. Compare comments with other professor and you might discover a lot of cutting and pasting! My university uses negative student evaluations as a sword to keep professors in line and the students are fully aware of this situation.

So, student evaluations are just opinions. Their importance is dictated by how your administration utilizes the results.

For myself, I rely on face to face discussions with students to solve their problems and adjust what I am doing to make each and every class better. That’s what the real world does anyway.

What I do in this situation is 1) listen to the comments as undefensively as I can manage and 2) change how I prepare students for the assessment next time. There is often one malcontent in a class, and those I ignore, but If I get more than two or more comments saying the same thing in evaluations, I have to admit that it isn’t that the evaluations are “wrong.” Students are reporting on their experience, and that is in truth what they experienced. But it sometimes happens that I somehow failed to prepare my students effectively–even though I thought I informed them adequately, in fact whatever I did didn’t work. It is sometimes not enough to post things or send out an announcement especially when students have not been trained to expect important information via those routes already, or if the habit of using rubrics and posting them in advance has not been integrated into all the assignments ahead of time. We are all slow to adapt to a new situation and students are no different.
As for your official evaluations, if you have a lot of these types of experiences and don’t learn from them that could be a problem, but everyone who teaches has had the odd debacle, and as long as you learn from them no long-term harm ensues. At my campus it is how we learn from our mistakes that counts since there is nobody who doesn’t make some mistakes.

Do away with student evaluations of teachers because they are not accurate reflections of what students actually learned.

In science courses we now have research based conceptual evaluations which accurately test student understanding. These have been used to figure out how to change courses to achieve better learning. When the courses are changed to get better learning you have to generally decrease lecture, increase questioning, and make a number of other nontraditional changes. In physics education this has resulted in normalized learning gains of 30 to 70% as contrasted to conventional classes with lower than 25% gain. But the kicker is that student evaluations of teachers almost always decrease significantly even though we can show much larger learning gains.

SETs are consumer surveys of satisfaction and do not correlate well with learning gains, or as we have found anticorrelate with the gain. There is also some evidence that effective interactive engagement (IE) also improves student thinking skills, while conventional courses do not. So sometimes the choice may be between an effective course, or a popular course. Which should universities have????

So at the same time you do things that rebut the student criticizms, work to have this nonsense killed. Look at and forward the research articles about SETS to interested parties, deans, and fellow teachers.

I think for me, the syllabus test works because I only teach online now. If I went back to teaching face-to-face, I’d have to think about how to communicate instructions differently. For online students, I suspect that the ones who don’t read the instructions/syllabus are the ones who don’t devote enough time to the class (online can be “out of sight, out of mind”), and so a test forces them to spend an appropriate amount of time. It’s very few points, but points are points in their eyes.

To get through the noise of information overload, I just try to write everything like a newspaper article. That is, if newspaper articles are still written with critical information first! I really try not to bury nuggets of information.

One other tip for online teachers: After I have the syllabus prepared, I prepare a “syllabus supplement” document. It’s the syllabus, but it has notes in red that are the kind of notes a student might take if we had a live class. Because this document also includes the official syllabus, I tell students to just read this. The other one is the one that goes on file. I’ve received positive feedback about this. I can put lots of extra things in there such as the reasoning behind some of the items, a more detailed communication procedure, etc.

Thanks for using my CC-licensed photo. I drew that scale on a whiteboard as part of a student group evaluation exercise. The course was a graduate IT seminar that I teach at Hawaii Pacific University.

I’ve done this myself. It works!

This makes a lot of sense. At the end of the course, students are “tired” (from the entertainment part of their life that takes precedence over academics) and usually tired of you as a professor. They are a bit testy (sic?). Mid-evals are long enough for students to know how things are going.

Sound advice, but the problem here is not just a question of instructor philosophy. Every semester the instructors involved in teaching our “Principles” of Biology” series agonize over how to get the required material covered in the allotted time which is difficult even without snow days and other interruptions. Every semester I swear that this time I’m not going to be so redundant in covering directives and requirements for assignments and lab reports, etc., and every semester the students make it abundantly clear that if I don’t repeat myself, and re-spoon feed all over again, the results would be mass carnage when the assignments are graded. So every semester some topics are not covered as well as they should be because of the time required for spoon feeding. And then you are STILL accused of making assignments unclear, not offering feedback, etc. on student evaluations.

I think that the larger problem is the nature of assessment–whether it applies to us or to our students. What are we doing when we grade them? What are we doing when we ask students to grade us? There are any number of answers to these questions, but I think the answers that interest us as teachers have to do with getting and giving feedback to help us reflect on what we’re doing and to help us make adjustments. The problem is that when we attach a punishment or reward to this feedback process, we inevitably distort it. Alfie Kohn has written extensively about this in, among other books, Punished By Rewards. In my discipline of teaching writing, Peter Elbow has written about it in “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Kinds of Judgment.”

The obvious thing to do is to de-couple student feedback from faculty evaluations. I’ve read a number of articles and studies that question the accuracy of student evaluations. (One end-of-the-semeser survey asked students to rank the usefulness of course materials–including books that they had not read. You guessed it–the students ranked the materials even though they weren’t on the reading list.) But we continue to use them because translating teachers’ performance into a number makes things easier for administrators.

Asking them questions like Professor Whitney does, gives us useful information. It’s good for us to know if they are not accessing information (like the grading rubrics) that we’re posting. It allows us to make adjustments (though no adjustments will solve the problem of students who just don’t bother). The key thing, I think, is to be able to benefit from this kind of feedback without having it hurt us in the tenure and promotion process.

Unfortunately student evaluations as a part of that process are not likely to go away or even be reformed. They’re just too convenient for administrations to give up. Hopefully you have other assessment tools (like peer observations) and a supportive department. But getting feedback from students in order to be a better teacher (whether or not this is recognized and rewarded by your institution) is something that we should do. We can also bear in mind how punishments and rewards distort the feedback process and do our best to find alternative ways to give our own students better feedback.

“Another provision in the plan would bar any University of Wisconsin campus from participating in advanced networks connecting research institutions worldwide”

wtf?

I guess that when the Wisconsin legislature discovers that the Internet was developed through DARPA (and thus the federal govt), it will bar all universities from using it. They are seriously going to make Wisconsin universities withdraw from Internet2 as well? Talk about ignorant.

Sounds like the governor and legislator are followers of Lysenko.

Anyone have a database of Wisconsin campaign contributions by telecom companies?

Walker doesn’t have a degree.

This seems to reflect ignorance of the way in which the internet developed as a research tool. There may be legitimate issues to discuss: moving more internet services into private hands, much as the U.S. is “privatizing” important aspects of space exploration now that the initial technology challenges have been addressed. But to terminate UW’s links to other research institutions without first developing a long-term strategy to provide adequate connectivity displays either ignorance of the way the internet works or a deliberate attempt to seriously diminish the university. Neither is good.

So this was a fed government subsidy going to a state/university entity to support “community” broadband. (I’m using community as an omnibus nonprofit sort of term.)Let me speculate what will happen.
Those schools, community orgs, etc., won’t be able to afford the “going rate” in the now much-condensed “free market” telecom playing field, so they will need support subsidies from things like e-rate and other fed handouts to be able to buy it. Punch line: SO instead of the gov’t subsidy going to support higher education in myriad forms, it will go into the bottom line profits of the telcos.
Incredibly sad.
Watch “Inside Job” if you haven’t already – the govt is asleep at the wheel. Once again, the risk (in this case, building the network) was public, and the profit is to be private. How is this different from shovelling my tax dollars right into the mouths of the telcos?

This isn’t even *eating* the seed corn- they’ve decided to burn it

Also, interstate highways have an unfair competitive advantage over privately operated toll roads. The Wisconsin legislature should bar any University of Wisconsin campus from participating in advanced road networks connecting Wisconsin to other states.

Carrying on the fine traditions of Senator Proxmire, I see.

I asked because of Pawlenty’s comment that if you can find something by using a Google search, the government should not be providing it. I did not make the Milwaukee/Minneapolis mistake. :)