At 12:07 AM 1/26/2001 +0000, Richard Pisacreta wrote:
>In my opinion, student evaluations are almost useless (I get good ones).
>
>Freshman have no basis to grade college profs.
>
>The #1 variable that determines course evaluation is expected grade in the
>course. Profs who show lots of movies, drop the lowest test, let
>attendance count for 25% of the grade, etc. tend to get good evals.
>
>Profs who make students work get slammed. One of my favorite evals was,
>"Pisacreta sucks. I had to study every week in order to get a decent grade."
>
>
>
>Rip
Rip makes a great point about the correlation between expected grades and
course evaluations. When I started teaching, way back a whole 3 years ago,
I anticipated such a correlation, since I was determined to teach
challenging courses and to pursue a job as a full-time instructor after
grad school I was concerned about my course evaluations. With that in
mind, I decided to include the following questions at the end of my
evaluation form for students. These questions follow a series of rating
scale and open-ended questions that are about more specific aspects of the
course (homework, fairness of my evaluation of students, in-class
activities, etc.).
What grade do you expect to receive in this class? Why?
What grade would you give your instructor for his teaching of this class? Why?
I do not find much correlation between these grades. Of course, I cannot
tell for certain how well students anticipate their own grade. I do know
that particularly in the larger intro and social psych classes I have
taught (120-200 students) there is a reasonable distribution of grades,
with the exception of F, which students who would have earned that grade
usually dropping the class. As far as the students answering the question
about their expected grade, my guess is that there is some optimistic bias,
but I know I get a reasonable distribution of expected grade
responses. So, in the end my point is that student's expected grades do
not necessarily correlate with course evaluation (I sometimes receive
evaluations similar to those recently mentioned by Miriam Resendez where
strong students think it's too easy. I also receive quite a few good
evaluations from students who have performed poorly and either recognize
their own role in their performance, or blame an extenuating circumstance
[another thread for another day]). I think that by including these
questions at the end of the evaluation, after I've guided students to think
about all aspects of the class I earn a pretty honest grade myself. So, if
anyone's concerned about this issue, you can certainly add questions like
this to your evaluation forms.
As an aside, when I first did this, I thought of it more as a way to cover
my backside. I figured if, the correlation existed, I could document it
when it came time to share course evaluations with potential
employers. And I could revel in the unintended backhanded compliments that
I receive, like the one Rip used as his example above.
One last aside, I find students like the symmetry of assigning me an
overall letter grade, since I will be doing that for them shortly after
they evaluate me (but of course before I read their evaluations).
Don
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Donald J. Rudawsky
University of Cincinnati
Dept. of Psychology
PO Box 210376
Cincinnati, OH 45210-0376
513.558.3146
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://homepages.uc.edu/~rudawsdj
