Comments on: More on ratings

By: The Salt-Box

The Salt-Box — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 01:13:11 +0000

Teaching Carnival #7…

If you’re reading this, it means that the wordherders.net server is up and running again . . . Sorry for……

By: Sarah W

Sarah W — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 17:19:05 +0000

I don’t want to bite my students, (but I’m not in a tenure position) but I do want to throw things at them sometimes :)

As a student, I hate the short time period that evals are open, right when I’m writing final papers, grading, and everything else. It should be open longer so we have TIME to do the evals.

By: admin

admin — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 21:57:20 +0000

Thanks, I guess I ought to be less open-ended on my tags…

By: jason

jason — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 21:30:43 +0000

Wow! yes, giving the evals after the fact is a great idea. I know I’m a good teacher. Why? because I get people coming back to me a saying “You, know what? Your course changed the way I think about the world…” or whatever. Having a course eval that says the readings were too hard, or the assignments required too much work, or that my lectures were not ‘well organized’ doesn’t help me much; rather it highlights issues in students’ prior expectations and experiences.

Thinking back to my undergrad: I would say that of my 23 full year undergrad credits, there were no more than 5-6 profs who really did anything for me. MA: 2 out of 5. PhD 3 out of 8, of the ones I took courses with. Who really expected more than that? I was there to learn, not to be entertained. I was there to get a degree, not delight.

Not that I think students shouldn’t expect more, and demand more from faculty, but the question is criteria. It would be nice if course evals included questions like “Did the instructor force you to look at issues from a different perspective?”

By: jason

jason — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 21:18:34 +0000

The cat ate your html on this one. I think that the end tag borked.