At the end of the semester, most students are busy studying for exams and putting the finishing touches on final papers. With everything going on in those last few weeks, it's easy to push student course evaluations to the back burner, especially because evaluations are now overwhelmingly anonymous and online.
Plenty of students don't see skipping out on evals as a big deal. Your professors may push you to fill out your course evaluations, but does your feedback even matter?
Misused and Unreliable
In institutions of higher education, this question is fraught with difficulty. Student evaluations do impact professors' careers — at some universities, evaluations can contribute as much as 40 percent to decisions regarding pay raises, for example. However, despite their hefty impact, evaluations are often misused and unreliable.
If you've ever heard a classmate get excited to roast a difficult professor on student evaluations, you know they often say more about a teacher's popularity than their job performance. It's also well-known that course evaluations are often biased. One analysis found that female professors were rated lower than their male counterparts when evaluated for teaching large courses. For women and minorities, some student comments are belittling and downright rude.
Make Evaluations Matter
Though there are definitely flaws with evaluation systems, most students want to positively contribute. One survey found that over 66 percent of students thought student evaluations were useful. And because they have so much to do with the career progression of professors, course evaluations do matter. Students can counter the problems with evaluations by filling them out and filling them out well.
Here are three ways you can make course evaluations matter more to professors, school administrators and future students.
1. Evaluate all your professors, not just ones you don't like.
As course evaluations have moved out of the classroom and online, fewer students are taking time to fill them out. This is a problem because it means that students with a vendetta against a certain professor are more motivated to complete them.
Often, feedback filled with vitriol is not as useful to professors and administrators as feedback that provides constructive criticism. Even if you feel neutral about one of your classes, still take the time to fill out your evaluations. Your feedback will balance out hateful comments that might skew results or simply get ignored.
This advice goes for professors you really like as well. Take the time to provide glowing reviews for professors when you have them. This helps non-tenured professors keep their jobs, and it can also alleviate the pressure they may feel, allowing them to focus on teaching effectively instead of sucking up to students.
2. Answer open-ended questions.
In one of the surveys mentioned earlier, researchers found that less than 50 percent of students wrote comments in response to open-ended questions. They suspect this is because almost half of the students surveyed didn't believe professors read their comments.
Believe it or not, most professors care about your feedback. Though there's always that one tenured professor who throws their evals in the trash, the majority of teachers use comments to improve their courses. In fact, faculty and administrators work together all year round to improve department efficacy, even outside of course evaluation time.
If you really want to make a difference through your course evaluations, take a few extra minutes to complete long-answer questions. When you report exactly what worked and what didn't, and give suggestions to make the course better, you give faculty the tools they need to implement change.
3. Compare courses fairly.
Everyone has subjects they don't like. That's natural. However, common student dislikes can negatively skew evaluation results for undergraduate professors teaching unpopular courses. When you fill out course evaluations, try to rate professors on how well they teach, not how much you like their subject.
Studies have found that students rate quantitative courses such as math lower than qualitative courses such as English and history. To make sure you're giving a fair evaluation, compare courses to similar ones. For example, if you're an English major, compare your gen-ed calculus course to other math courses you've taken instead of to your favorite lit classes.
Your evaluations should show not how much you liked the class but how much you were able to learn from the experience.
Create Lasting Change
Though student evaluations are far from perfect, they do have a real impact on which professors get to teach future students. And if you have an ax to grind, doing it respectfully and thoroughly is the difference between an ignored comment and lasting change in a program.
Ultimately, students drive higher education. Your professors can't do their jobs without you, and when your feedback is helpful, it helps them do their jobs better.
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