Even if it isn’t all that effective, evaluating your professors has advantages
My last writing here, which was theoretically about TVO’s Best Lecturer competition, ended up generating a lot of discussion about student evaluations simply because I mentioned them in passing. So I guess there’s some appetite for this topic. I’ll oblige with a three-part series on the topic, covering the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Because, after all, the world has arranged things that come in threes according to these categories ever since 1966 (see the link if you’re confused).
Briefly, my qualifications on this subject are as follows. I published three editions of the Anti-Calendar on my campus. This involves reading a lot of evaluations, and the raw comments that come with them. I’ve been involved with academic governance for quite some time, and professors just love to talk about this stuff. And I regularly read Rate Your Students, which is just an awesome site for anyone who particularly cares to delve into the (frequently unattractive) private lives and feelings of professors.
So here are all the really good aspects of student evaluations, that I can think of immediately:
Student evaluations do matter, and the more seriously students take them the more impact they can have. Of course this doesn’t mean that everything is perfect, and this is a topic I’ll return to next entry. But I very strongly encourage all students to put thought into the evaluations they fill out and to be responsible with their feedback. There’s no excuse to throw away a meaningful opportunity to make your voice heard, just because you suspect (and most likely you’re right) that it won’t have as much impact as you’d like. The accumulated feedback of many students saying the same thing does have impact. But if too many students throw away the opportunity to be part of that, it can’t happen.