Lenient grading
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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