I have written, more than once over the years, about student evaluations—the good, the bad, and the ugly. The ones we have at the Robins School of Business seem fairly standard as far as I know. They are electronic which is helpful. They ask each student to make quite a list of judgments such as developing critical thinking, teacher preparation, teacher enthusiasm, treating students with respect, and so on. Our evaluation contains 22 judgments where students must select one of 5 responses and then three open-ended questions.
I want to personalize my student evaluations. I do not
want to drop any questions because I understand that the overall results are
used to calculate school averages. Nevertheless, I want to add at
least one question that will appear only on my student
evaluations. If the evaluations are supposed to be for my benefit,
then I would like to ask a question that is specifically for me.
With a bit of explanation, the person who oversees our student
evaluations has been kind enough to allow me to add one question for the spring
semester of 2023. We will be doing this as a test to see whether the
ability to personalize student evaluations provides any particular
benefit. I am delighted, but I have no idea whether this will work
or not. I discovered long ago that my ideas are not always great
ideas.
This, of course, brings up the obvious. What one
question do I want to add to my student evaluations that will be just for
me? What do I want to know that is not already being
covered? I have a wonderful opportunity here and I don’t want to
ruin it with some useless question. Remember, the student
evaluations already contain a total of 25 queries. What is left to
ask?
What would you ask? What question could you put on your
student evaluation that would be helpful in judging how successful you were
during the semester? If you have any good thoughts, stop
right now and send me an email (Jhoyle@richmond.edu) because I am interested in
every possible approach. I might change my mind and put your
question on my evaluations.
I have read a lot of student evaluations over the decades and it
is difficult sometimes to get at the foundational information that I believe
would be helpful. Many of the open-ended questions almost beg the
student to write paragraphs if not pages. I don’t want more of that
because I already have that in the present form. Those answers often
ramble and lose direction. They seem designed to glorify the
professor or be vindictive. I want a question that can be answered
by a student in one sentence and will tell me something essential about the
semester.
Here is what I finally submitted,
“What do you believe is the professor's primary
goal for this class?”
To me, if I have not clearly helped every student understand what
I want to accomplish, then the semester would seem to be a failure by
definition. On the other hand, if the students truly understand what
I want from the class, then the rest of their student evaluation judgments are
much more meaningful for me because they are based on that foundation.
Notice that almost all (perhaps all) typical student evaluation
inquiries have a positive and a negative side. Is the teacher
prepared? Is the teacher enthusiastic? Does the teacher
succeed in developing critical thinking skills? Heck, every student
can see which answer is “good” and which answer is “bad.” Consequently,
student responses all seemed to be biased based on the student’s general
feelings toward the teacher. “I like the teacher so I’m going to
rate the teacher a bit higher on developing critical thinking skills because
that will make the teacher look good.” What does that prove?
However, the question, “What do you believe is the professor's
primary goal for this class?” does not necessarily have a positive and a
negative side. Yes, I do understand that a student might put, “To learn
the material” and that doesn’t really tell much but it is neither positive nor
negative. I am truly hoping, though, that the students will be more
specific than that. I want to know what they think I want them to
accomplish. We’ve been working together for months. Surely, they
have some thoughts as to my purpose for them and for the class.
In the end, this is merely an experiment to see how the students
will respond and what I might learn from it. I have high hopes but,
if you check back in about six months from now, I will let you know whether
this “extra question” proves beneficial or is basically a waste of
time. Fingers crossed for interesting results.
If it were you, what question would you want to ask?
