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Evaluating our professor evaluations

It’s that time of year again — the time when power is put in the hands of the students to grade their professors. Scantron sheet are submitted in each class, where students must grade their professors on a variety of criteria and summarize their feelings about the class as whole. Ultimately, we hope, these evaluations will provide some kind of feedback that professors can use to improve their classes in the future.

Student attitudes towards their professors sway for a variety of reasons, whether it’s the quality of a lecture or their mark in the class. But grades fluctuate and depend as much on the difficulty of the test as the particular professor’s teaching skills. While it might not seem like best method, teacher evaluations are an appropriate way for the university to gauge student opinions.

When used poorly, students will inevitably use teacher evaluations as a cathartic process. Anonymous comments are the perfect way for students to release their pent up anger for a certain professor. But while this may be an elegant form of therapy, it’s hardly the best medium to express their frustrations. It begs the question as to whether students are best equipped to judge professors fairly.

When done well, however, it gives the university at least some kind of metric to bring praise or criticism to professors or instructors from an outside voice. After all, performance evaluations are used in every profession and while they can’t be perfect, they’re at least useful combined with peer review and other forms of evaluation.

Giving students a chance to offer feedback is a no-brainer, but how this data is used will depend on the professor’s willingness to accept criticism and look beyond the students who are just venting over poor grades.

Given they’re at least marginally useful for profs and quite useful for students, it would be sensible to add TA evaluations, possibly run through the faculty, since students often have more contact with TAs than professors.

Inevitably, teacher evaluations are most useful when the verdict is unanimous — when students voice a collective verdict, they can draw attention to unskilled professors who slip under the radar each year or give good professors the praise they deserve.

—The Gazette Editorial Board

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