Teaching evals

Getting high evals

• Lenient grading

• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2466/pr0.1996.78.3c.1363

  • Be organized

  • Administer ratings before tests

  • Tell students evaluations are for administration, not improvement; tell in a relxed, humerous wayt

  • Gimmicks, entertain

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• Give feedback early in course

• http://collegemisery.blogspot.com/2010/11/10-ways-to-boost-your-student.html

• Make everyone answer

• Ask for feedback early in course (checkin)

• tell about my student volunteers (have them speak)

• Explain expertise

• Give treats!

• https://meggin.com/5-tips-for-getting-great-student-evaluations/

• https://mtprof.msun.edu/Fall1997/HOWTORAI.html

• https://www.scst.org/blog/the-secret-to-improving-your-future-course-evaluations-now

  • Did the professor build and follow an organized pathway designed to help me learn the material?

    Did the professor really cared about whether or not I learned the material?Students want to be different as a result of spending an entire term with you and to not have wasted their time.

    This seemingly straightforward result gives you a secret pathway to improve your course evaluation scores, right here in the last stretch of the course.  After the mid-term has passed, distribute to your students a simple three question survey during the last ten minutes of a well-attended class.  Here are the survey questions:

Question One:  What is one thing that is working really well for you about how this class is structured that we definitely don’t want to get rid of in future course offerings?

Question Two:  What is one thing that you really wish could change about this class that would help you learn better?

Question Three:  Is there anything else that the professor should know?

• Willimon properly counsels professors who want good evaluations to "never overtly confront students about their class attendance, indolence, apathy, or impertinent behavior. 

• . Naftulin concluded that a lecturer's authority, wit, and personality can "seduce" students into the illusion of having learned, even when the content of the lecture was nil. 

• that an instructor, merely by speaking more "enthusiastically"--defined as varying voice pitch and using more hand gestures--can seduce students into rating every aspect of the instructor and course more highly than when the instructor spoke less dramatically, another powerful demonstration of the "halo effect.

• Here's more good news: you can inflate your evaluation scores even more by giving really high grades to really poor students (let me name this the Santa Clause effect). Snyder and Clair found that students who received higher grades than they expected tended to give "very positive teacher evaluations" (the "happy birthday effect," 75), rating tests, lectures, and the professor's teaching style more favorably. Worthington came to the same conclusion: "Those with least mastery are, in general, more likely to give more positive evaluations when their grades are inflated" (774).

  But be on guard, there may also be a "grinch who stole Christmas effect." Holmes found that when students didn't get the grades they expected 

• tudents think that when an instructor objectively reports the controversial conclusions of scientific research, he or she endorses or likes the findings. Coren discovered that a quarter of the students were apt to interpret the presentation of evidence about the genetic and racial differences in intelligence as motivated by racism, rendering the professor a racist for twenty-five percent of students (14). When the subject of discussion was the cognitive skills of men and women, twenty-six percent deemed the instructor "sexist" and motivated by a desire to put down women, with ninety-four percent of female students thinking this.

• Use these proven methods to raise your numbers.

  1. Oprah students. Let them know that you are a victim and that you have suffered (spouse left you, mother just died, etc). Students, many of whom are soap-opera junkies, will cut you some slack.

  2. Rosie O'Donnell students. Fawn over them and praise them lavishly! Tell them they are wonderful and God's gift to graduate school. Inflate your evaluation numbers by inflating their egos.

  3. Bribe students. Lay on the goodies. For example, bring cookies to exams, let them out early on a regular basis and cancel a lot of Friday classes. Another way to get better ratings from them is to throw a party for them! For the biggest bang for the buck, throw it at the end of the semester, before evaluations are made out. No researcher has yet analyzed the correlation between end-of-the-semester suck-ups and evaluation scores, but the pay-off must be worth it because some instructors invest a whole lot of money into bringing pizzas to class.

But….

(1) "If we truly want to discover which teachers make a positive and lasting difference, we will not poll pupils; we will examine them. We will not solicit their opinions; we will observe their behavior; to see which of them have been improved and which not" (Hocutt 58).

(2) As Damron pointed puts it, "This salutary effect would be lost if validation testing proved the instrument to be invalid" (Damron "Instructor" 7).

(3) Since the halo effect plays such a prominent role in evaluation research and in this essay, a word or two more about it would be appropriate. The concept is used to refer to the fact that if an individual is viewed as having some good qualities there is a bias towards assuming that the person in question has all good qualities. The flip side is that a person who is seen as being "bad" in one area is likely to be judged "bad" across a broad spectrum of behaviors. Some qualities of an instructor or student perceptions of an instructor have more power than others to create the halo effect. For example, being "charismatic" or "likeable" to students raises scores in almost all other evaluation categories, even those not associated with the instructor. Similarly, if an instructor is not charismatic, he or she is likely to be found wanting in other categories. Coren has argued that "if students are making negative comments on your course organization and your classroom presentation, it is likely that the operation of the halo effect will cause students to generalize their poor ratings to any questions with social and political content" (Coren "Are" 16). Simply put, "if the students do not like an instructor's teaching style, class organization or even the course textbook, when given the opportunity to do so, they are likely to label that instructor as racist, sexist and culturally biased" ("Are" 16).