Difficulty of Student Evaluations

ProfHacker over at the Chronicle of Higher Education has a great piece on the problem of student evaluations, "When student evaluations are just plain wrong." Well worth the read, especially the comments section from professors. This is an area that I constantly struggle with especially operating in an educational system with three different and divergent evaluation systems plagued with statistical problems, bias, and poor question design. I have a running list of techniques, some mentioned in the comments, that I am hoping to implement to improve the situation. I am also a firm believer in faculty posting and/or making their evaluations by students available to students. It helps the students, and it allows the faculty to see how they are performing as a group. Without the evaluations students rightly can complain that Professor A would be rated as difficult 8 when the bulk of faculty are rating difficulty 5. Without that information, the students can get blindsided by the variation in expectations. 

The posting is also important to emphasize to students, who often don't realize, how serious their evaluations are for promotion, review and curricular direction. I am probably going to add the contract suggestion to my classes in the future.

Update on April 1, 2011 at 17:55 by Jason A. Smith

The Chronicle recently posted another article related to this topic: the use of peer evaluations to balance student evaluations.