Student Evaluations. What Do They Mean and What Can You Do to Improve Them?

by Chris Cumo

The University of Washington in Seattle was the first American university in the early 1920s to let students evaluate their professors, writes Peter Seldin, distinguished professor of management at Pace University, in “When Students Rate Professors.” The practice spread slowly, noted Robin Wilson in “New Research Casts Doubt on the Value of Student Evaluations of Professors.” In 1973 only about 30 percent of U.S. colleges and universities mandated evaluations. Today, however, they are ubiquitous, and they have sway. George Niketas, chair of the English department at Charleston Southern University in South Carolina believes they exert the greatest force at small colleges and universities that value teaching over scholarship. “Evaluations were used [at Charleston Southern University] as a club to keep someone from advancing,” he said.

Robert S. Owen knows how powerful they can be. In 1995 Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania denied him tenure because students had given him mixed reviews. His marriage crumbled, and his savings evaporated along with his faith in the purity of academe. Despite these hardships, Owen got a second chance, landing an assistant professorship at SUNY at Oswego. He will never underestimate the influence of student evaluations.

This is not news to an adjunct, whose livelihood depends on strong evaluations. But how does one’s teaching elicit good ratings? The question plagued Cornell University psychology professor Stephen Ceci, whose mediocre evaluations prompted administrators to suggest he seek guidance from media consultants, who recommended he enliven his lectures. He took their advice, adding gestures, walking around the room, and varying the pitch of his voice to lectures that were otherwise identical to those that students had rated mediocre. He even used the same text and assigned the same papers and schedule of exams. These changes were enough to elevate Ceci’s evaluations, though he does not think they made him a better teacher, for student performance remained constant. Students even rated the same text higher than had students in previous semesters. “Student ratings are far from the bias-free indicators of instructor effectiveness that many have touted them to be,” concluded Ceci in a 1997 article in Change, the monthly magazine of the American Association of Higher Education. “Student ratings can make or break the careers of instructors on grounds unrelated to objective measures of student learning, and for factors correctable with minor coaching.”

Provost Eugene Arden of the University of Michigan at Dearborn dismisses the notion that style trumps substance. Instructors need only use common sense to garner good ratings. They should clearly state their expectations in their syllabi, keep office hours, promptly grade and return exams and papers with comments that tell students how to improve their performance, and offer them a chance to participate in class. Douglas Steeples, Vice President for academic affairs at Aurora University in Illinois adds that instructors will get strong marks by being prepared and organized for class, exhibiting enthusiasm, welcoming student questions, fostering independent thought, and stimulating student interest in the subject. English professor Richard Veit of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington believes the best teachers have infectious enthusiasm for their subject. Students respond to this enthusiasm by rating faculty highly. But the path to better evaluations may not be this easy to follow according to mathematics professor Neal Koblitz at the University of Washington.

A 1988 article in The Journal of Eduational Psychology concluded that women will receive high evaluations only if they “display stereotypically feminine behavior,” he wrote in a letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Students perceive disciplines like math, where the work is arduous and standards rigorous, as a man’s turf and evaluate female instructors poorly. Male students are especially likely to give low marks to women who are tough graders. Women get high ratings only if students perceive them as nurturing, warm, and accessible.

The career of Kelly Dennis, a former assistant professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, corroborates Koblitz’s argument. She received mixed reviews from students; some found her an inspired teacher; others thought she assigned too many papers, was aloof, arrogant, and biased against men. Her severest critics branded her a lesbian because she displayed what they deemed pornographic photos, such as an image of a nude woman holding a dildo to her crotch. “It’s clear to me since I’ve been here that an opinionated, intelligent woman is assumed to be a dyke,” Dennis told The Chronicle of Higher Education, “and I refuse to play into the misogyny of that assumption.” The institute dismissed her in 1998 after her second year of bipolar evaluations.

But Professor Seldin of Pace University disagrees that evaluations are biased against women. The research on such evaluations shows no correlation between an instructor’s sex and his or her ratings, he asserts. Likewise no correlation exists between evaluations and the rigor of grading, amount of course work, and a teacher’s rank. Seldin’s assertions, however, do not square with the research of Anthony Greenwald, a psychology professor at the University of Washington. In a 1997 article in American Psychologist he examined the ratings of hundreds of courses at his university and found a positive correlation between grades and evaluations. “Some professors stick to their guns and get punished,” says Paul Trout, associate professor of English at Montana State University. “But an awful lot of people have figured out how to get their numbers high enough so that the evaluations are not a liability to them. People are changing their teaching, the rigor of their courses, to insure they get tenure.”

Robert S. Owen is among them. He gets high ratings at SUNY at Oswego by giving multiple choice rather than essay exams. He requires that students critique sample papers rather than write their own, and he may even award extra credit for initiative to a student who challenges the fairness of a test question. “If students come to my office, I have to make sure they walk out happy,” he said. “The student in college is being treated as a customer in a retail environment, and I have to worry about customer complaints.” This logic suffuses Generation X Goes to College, in which Peter Sacks recounts how mediocre evaluations almost cost him an assistant professorship in journalism at a West Coast community college. He salvaged the job by pandering to students. “I became a teaching teddy bear,” he writes. “Students could do no wrong, and I did almost anything possible to keep them happy, all of the time, no matter how childish or rude their behavior, not matter how poorly they performed in the course.” His colleagues encouraged this laxity. One suggested he take students out for pizza, and another encouraged him to bring donuts to class. These tactics garnered Sacks solid ratings and tenure in 1995, though he quit soon after in disillusionment to pursue a career as a freelance writer. “This was higher education as a consumeristic, pandering enterprise,” he writes. “The love of learning was completely whitewashed out.”

William Cashin, director for faculty evaluation and development at Kansas State University, disagrees. He has studied thousands of evaluations and has found that the highest ones go to instructors who demand the most from their students. Students want to learn, Cashin believes, and reward instructors who teach well. Whatever their value, student evaluations are an insufficient measure of teaching believes Pat Hutchings of the American Association of Higher Education. She believes that only faculty can gauge the effectiveness of a teacher. Russell Edgerton, past president of the association agrees. “If teaching were to be seen as scholarly, intellectual work, it would not be enough to evaluate teaching simply by looking at student ratings,” he said. “Teaching, like research, should be peer reviewed.”

Of course, peer review is rarely used when evaluating adjuncts. In many departments, course evaluations are the sole measure of a part-time faculty member’s teaching. When this is the case, the question of whether evaluations are valid is moot; they determine one’s future employment within a department or program. As a result, adjuncts interested in ongoing employment are forceed to do whatever is necessary to garner excellent student evaluations. For some, as in the cases of Owen and Sacks, this may mean pandering to students.

Such an approach (as calculating as it may sound) is virtually the only recourse available to those part-time faculty whose supervisors choose to rely solely on student evaluations for rehiring purposes. This is particularly true for those adjunct faculty who teach primarily introductory courses, which many students take only under duress, and which growing numbers of tenured and tenure-line faculty teach under duress. The lucky adjunct who lands an upper division course may be able to challenge students and still win high evaluations.

To be sure, not all research agrees with Koblitz, Owen, or Sacks. This is so, perhaps, because teaching is art rather than science. Those who do it extraordinarilywell are able to elevate both the subject and their students to majestic heights. These faculty bring an intangible and infectious sense of wonder to their discipline. Their lectures teem with knowledge and with flights of verbal virtuosity. They leave the sundry plain of mere mortals to approach the lair of the gods. And they receive good evaluations.

The vast majority of part-time faculty are mere mortals, of course. They’ve not been dipped into the River Styx by the seagoddess Thetis. For those women and men, a round of poor student evaluations can be just as lethal as the poisoned arrow Achilles took in the tendon. As a result, as long as administrators rely primarily on student evaluations as the reemployment benchmark, part-time faculty will be forced to resort to pandering, pizza and donuts as protection against the poisoned arrow of bad teaching evaluations.