About a third of students at two universities admit that they fib in year-end course evaluations, The Des Moines Register reports. In a survey of students at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and the University of Northern Iowa, some said they exaggerated in a positive direction, but more said they tended to bend the truth in a negative way. The study is to be published next year in the journal Marketing Education Review.
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Is there a positive correlation between the level of the passing grade (A, B, C) and positive evaluation? What is the correlation between a failing grade and a negative evaluation?
NO WAY!
Well, for those of you who are accomplished at getting students to lie in your favor, Texas A&M schools will pay you cash bonuses if your scores are higher than your colleagues. Is that a great recruiting pitch or what?!
This is news? I’m sure that there are many reasons besides a passing grade behind positive “fibbing,” and while I’m sure the same goes for negative “fibbing,” we all know that the number one reason is to get back at a professor for bad/failing grades.
One student’s evaluation of a course is an opinion and I don’t think it qualifies as an absolute and objective “truth” by itself. The utility of student evaluations should be found in the overall patterns revealed by the responses of many students.
Students lie on the student evaluations, but they don’t lie on a survey about student evaluations?
Zing!
And then there are those who just make pretty patterns with the dots, viewing the whole exercise as a joke.
Numerous studies have confirmed that the frequency of cheating is higher when course examinations are not carefully proctored, being highest when no proctoring occurs. Anonymous surveys that disconnect name from opinion are similarly without a control mechanism which might attempt to insure integrity.
This is true of all survey research. It all balances out when there is a high enough response rate. Thousands of studies support the high value of student evaluations.
This is not a big surprise. However, admin will need to find a more reliable method for evaluating faculty than just course evaluations.
They lie about everything. No surprise here. What is disturbing is that other professors encourage students to rate a colleague low or high. How is the system working at Texas A&M?
Goodeyes’ comment calls for clarification. High response rate does not necessarily make a survey good or “balance out” results. More important is assurances that the responses received are representative of the population (e.g., a proportionate number of responses from those with low or high grades). Also important is that there are efforts to control for response bias (e.g., giving evaluations before grades are assigned, although students often have a good idea of their grade before they are assigned which is problematic). The statement that “thousands of studies support the high value of student evaluations” begs for support, perhaps at least one reference to a systematic review of the literature pertaining student evaluations or even one well-done study. Without such support the statement seems hyperbole.
The majority of students don’t attach enough importance to them, pay enough attention to them, or spend enough time on them to go to the effort to “lie.” Evaluations really aren’t of much use for anything beyond spotting a serious problem in the classroom. And, that’s the only thing I’ve ever seen them used for. A few hit jobs by disappointed students doesn’t do anybody in.
As far as grade inflation is concerned, people may be concerned about their teaching evaluations but, frankly, giving out good grades is just easier.
I think the simple explanations suffice here for the most part.
There isn’t a correlation between grades given and evaluations received — meta-analyses have placed it at about .08, which is nearly no relationship. You can’t buy good evaluations by giving good grades.
I’m shocked.
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
Reading some evaluations would make you wonder if the student was in the same classroom for the semester. It is usually the person most upset the almost makes up the biggest story. it works like politics if you say it often enough it becomes true. Especially if you say it to yourself over and over.
WilliamKeith: but you can buy evaluations by giving a barbecue at your home or inviting students over for a pool party. This has been a common experience of late and some faculty freely admit they do it without considering the consequences to their colleagues who do not socialize with their students. If grading is not an objective exercise then why all the hassle to assign. The the system can be gamed every day and when department heads are more concerned about happy students then educated students the happy crowd wins no matter how it was purchased.
What are reasons people have for disliking people? Don’t you hate it when someone keeps trying to get you to think something stupid, you know, stuff you’ve never heard of, stuff that sounds crazy, stuff that you will never use in any of your amorphously conceptualized but high-paying jobs you tend to in-between your life of hanging out with friends and hunting or shopping and. . . . Or, don’t you hate it when you’re given indications that you’re no good at something stupid, like calculating, or rational thought, or, worst of worse, creativity and humanity!!! and that you need to get better at it, to get through the hoops that will keep you from the great life that is just beyond the series of hoops? Jeeezzzz. And then, when the person doing any of these things to you all semester long isn’t even pretty of cute!! OMG! I hate all of that, and I’m glad when I can slam someone like that! It isn’t a lie, when you’re trying to hurt someone! Now don’t tell me how I’m wrong in my thinking here — I’ll slam you, if I get the chance!!!
courses are randomly taught—sometimes normal, sometimes gaussian, sometimes brownian distribution—courses are randomly evaluated—evaluations are randomly evaluated—-lies are randomly pro-offered, lies about lying are randomly pro-offered, randomness is randomly distributed, some of the time, maybe, I think, or so. Look as long as we can publish it, truth of it matters little.
This is hardly news. It is obvious to anyone who has been in academe that student evaluations tend to be overly positive. But that just makes the negative ones stand out more. If your evaluations are much worse than your colleagues, you are really at the bottom of the heap, and probably need help (or a different job, say administration?)
I’m shocked, shocked to find that fibbing is going on in here!
The Des Moines Register story had a bit more detail.
Does anyone have a copy of the underlying academic paper?
The great majority of studies on student ratings have not shown this effect, and have demonstrated that well-designed rating systems are valid and reliable.
I would like to look at the academic paper before drawing any conclusions, but a cursory examination of the Des Moines Register article would seem to call the “about a third” figure into question. It appears that four questions were asked about lying on comment forms:
• Have you written something untrue on the written comments because:
you wanted to protect a teacher? Yes: 3.9 percent
you liked a teacher? Yes: 11.2 percent
you wanted to hurt a teacher? Yes: 2.6 percent
you disliked a teacher? Yes: 12.9 percent
If you sum these results, you get 30.6 percent, which could be called “about a third.” But, there is no consideration for the fact that these are some of the same students. Students that “lie” for one reason are much more likely to lie for another. So, the real number is somewhere much lower than a third.
When the paper is released, I will be interested to take a look at it. But deciding that this study proves something based on a preview article in a newspaper is a bit premature.
There were some studies of course evaluations that showed how worthless they are. The first one showed that the evaluation correlated with the expected final grade, and when the actual grade was different the evaluation changed. Another showed that teacher attractiveness was a significant factor.
But the most telling research is in physics education. When the evaluations of student learning are increased by changing the methods of teaching, the student evaluations of the instructors went down.
Basically the research that shows the evauations to be reliable were not actually evaluationg what the students learned. For a good evaluation it needs to evaluate what the students learned and how their attitudes towards learning have changed. For example there are some tests which evaluate the attitudes towards learning such as the MPEX by Joe Redish at Maryland. But it is designed only to evaluate this for physics. So the evaluations need to be designed in a course specific fashion. In physics we have a variety of evaluations of learning which have been research based, and these are much better for gauging the quality of instruciton.
But if all the administrators care for is consumer satisfaction, then the current surveys of student opinions may be exactly what they want. The teachers can easily raise them by grade inflation!
Don’t forget other biases (or lies…) such as research that shows that men generally receive higher evaluation scores than women. Lying? or Bias? Treating students to special ‘access’ to a faculty may create a bias (positive) towards a faculty, but no matter what a female does, she will generally be scored lower than her male colleagues.
Anonymity and secrecy are always the adjuncts of deceit. Why don’t more commentators to the CHRONICLE use their names?
Mark C. Carnes, Department of HIstory, Barnard College
After aharing instruction in over 180 courses at all levels, over a 55 year period with dozens of colleagues and then reviewing the evaluations I have concluded that student evaluations have very limited value in estimating the effectiveness of the instrutor or the amount of learning or challenge provided. Evaluations might be more informative if they were given about five to ten years after graduation when the student had a chance to recognize the value of the instructor and the course Philip Dziuk University of Illinois
Students are not qualified to evaluate their professors. Anonymous end-of-course comments can be useful to the professor but they should not ever be used to evaluate the professor’s instructional effectiveness. Only the professor should see them. Anonymous teaching evaluations only serve to inflate grades and demoralize the faculty. Rigorous peer evaluation is a better approach.
Some students are indeed very qualified to evaluate their professors. I’ll tell you my perspective on this. There are plenty of students who skew their survey in a positive direction because despite the appearance of anonymity, they are afraid an instructor will recognize an individual based on their responses. If they need to take another class with the same instructor, they believe the instructor may take a previous poor review into account while grading for the current class. That was always my fear in the early days of my college education.
These days, I know my instructors will recognize me based on my comments, but I think my comments are important enough that they need to be said anyway. I keep them constructive as opposed to simply critical and hope the instructor will take my comments seriously. However, just like product reviews on the web (which is really similar when you think about it), you can’t trust everything that is said as gospel. You can, though, find the nuggets of genuine wisdom and you can spot patterns, both of which are useful, despite the fact that reviewers / students lie.
As so many other comments before, I’m shocked also, shocked…how could they?
We all know that kids don’t lie. Or do they?