While I know several others posted their thoughts on course evaluations at the end of the last semester, I wanted to wait to see what mine said before I processed my thoughts on them in this space.

See, typically, I earn very good evaluations. I am notoriously pretty difficult, so it's not grade inflation, but I am a performer. I use a lot of humor, I mix up lesson plans, and in good classes, the repartee usually whizzes around the room pretty quickly. I tend to treat students as peers who simply have fewer years of education under their belt, and they like me for that.

Accordingly, the evaluations from my "best" class last semester were astonishingly good: a full quarter of the students in that class said something like "Claycomb is the best professor I've ever had." Even in the class I was most frustrated with, my general "teaching effectiveness" scores were in the 83rd percentile for the College of Arts and Sciences.

I wonder, though, what these really measure. Yes, to the bottom-line-oriented administration (and I don't know enough about mine yet to say whether they are or not), these numbers fairly accurately tell them that I am likely to be a popular professor, will enroll courses generally well, and keep some butts in the seats. My popularity may have a positive impact on retention. I may attract a few extra students into the major (whether that's a good thing or not).

But are these students actually measuring their learning and my teaching effectiveness, or their pleasure in coming to my classroom and my performance acumen? I won't deny that they may be related in some ways, but I know that last semester was not the best I've ever taught. I know that I was tweaking things as we went along, and that I've made some significant changes to the way I am teaching both the Brit Lit class, and even the composition class (after 8 years in the writing classroom). I have several colleagues here who have a lot to teach me about teaching.

So while on the surface, these positive evals are great, the downside is that the fun students have in my class is something of an opiate: they don't see clearly what they're not getting, and accordingly, are not as equipped to tell me about their needs through evals.

Or perhaps they know that these things are used by chairs, faculty evaluators and tenure-granters as indicators of my performance, and since the students like me, they respond accordingly.

The other factor that these students cannot see is how much the classroom environment is crafted by them. In the two sections of Brit Lit II I taught, one was gregarious, engaged, and while not necessarily more talented, a bit higher performing. The other, as I repeatedly mentioned here, was more reticent, often even stubborn, about their passivity. For that class, I was far more active in developing lessons to get them to participate more actively, some of which were fairly successful. So how did the two classes respond to the question "The instructor stimulated class discussion"? Section 1 responded with a 4.96 out of 5, 96th percentile in the college. Section 2, where I worked harder to acheive results, responded with a still not terrible 4.51 out of 5, or 44th percentile. The difference? Not me, but them. The students themselves in this case were responsible for that difference.

You can drive yourself batty reading these tea leaves. So instead of spending too much time congratulating myself on good scores (which seem to be an expression of personal approval), I'm looking at what suggestions actually get made: that I work on getting quizzes back more quickly, and designing paper assignments a bit more manageably (something I adjusted some last semester, but may need to continue to work on).

Ah well, at least I don't have to worry about chili peppers on my Ratemyprofessors.com scores!