I'm assembling pull quotes from student evaluations for my file ("Dr. LP is the awesomest instructor who ever awesomed!!! W00t!"). Or I would be, if they were there. My hazy sense of my evaluations has always been that written comments are nowhere to be found. As I go through my ever-increasing collection of evals en masse, it looks like my hazy sense was, after all, quite clear. I have no written comments when students love the class; I have no written comments when students hate the class. A couple hundred (or more) evals so far have yielded about ten comments across the board. Occasionally, as happened a few years ago, enough students--by which I mean three or four out of a class of fifteen or more--felt worked-up enough about something to articulate their complaints; in that case, I took steps to fix the problem(s) for later students. But numbers alone don't help me fix anything.
Observation by colleagues is far better if you want real feedback
Posted by: Kerry | September 18, 2012 at 12:49 AM