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I taught my first class last quarter. The results for evaluations are very polarized. The raw data shows that my scores are either very high or very low for a majority of items. That implies some students loved the class and some hated it.

Honestly, this teaching experience has been so tiring that I am seriously thinking teaching is not for me. My colleagues tell me it will get better but I am not sure how I feel about my average performance. I wish the evaluations weren't so polarized so I could know if I was overall an effective instructor or not.

How would you make sense of the results?

Nate Eldredge
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Kar Masia
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    Students are under a lot of pressure and sometimes they will release it in ways that affect you (e.g. plagiarism, drama, non-constructive comments on evaluation). Try not to take it personally. – ff524 Apr 04 '16 at 19:14
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    What did the distribution of grades look like? Was the class homogeneous or did it contain students from different groups (e.g. majors vs. non-majors)? – Brian Borchers Apr 04 '16 at 19:53
  • I had about 20 who received As, around 12 Bs, around 10 in C range, 1 D and an F. It was an introductory level course so there were students from different majors. Why? – Kar Masia Apr 04 '16 at 19:56
  • How are the numbers? Are they split 50-50 between love and hate, or are there only a minority of one of the groups? – Davidmh Apr 04 '16 at 19:59
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    Did the students understand the scale? In my department it is common for about 20% of positive open remarks to be accompanied by bad numerical ratings. – StrongBad Apr 04 '16 at 20:04
  • Well, there are like 3-4 students with really low evaluations. Then there are the rest with (strongly agree), (agree), or (agree more than disagree). I checked my departments evaluations and they are usually around "agree" section, which means they haven't received super low scores (or their evaluations are evenly distributed).Those 3 low scores bring my overall evaluations really down. – Kar Masia Apr 04 '16 at 20:08
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    This of course has nothing to do with your question, but I couldn't help but be absolutely amazed at the grades! But then the majority of my teaching has been college algebra, precalculus, and first year calculus courses . . . – Dave L Renfro Apr 04 '16 at 20:17
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    They are on higher end. Right? I know. I still got people in my office crying because they thought they deserved As. In contrast, I would get this extremely well-written papers and well-prepared students. So, as an instructor, I was confused the whole time as well because half of the class did exceptionally well and the other half did very poorly. I never knew if the material was too easy or too difficult. Yet the evaluations say "complex material, boring material, no breaks in between". The department selected the text though. I don't know, honestly. I might just suck as an instructor! – Kar Masia Apr 04 '16 at 20:23
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    Polarization, if not heavily skewed to bad evaluation, is usually a good sign, especially with your marks profile. Not knowing anything about your course, only the marks and your evaluation, I would say you did great. You may have been hated by some, but you gave them a good education. They will see it much later. Don't worry and do not try to please everyone. Being respected is much better for a teacher than being liked. Of course, try to refine and improve, but, from the outset, this looks good. Did you face any consequences that you are worried about? Smart management ignores outliers. – Captain Emacs Apr 04 '16 at 20:31
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    At the very least, you weren't dull. This means higher course material retention for students. Good job. – svavil Apr 04 '16 at 20:32
  • Thank you! I would take any encouragement I could get right now. I am developing a whole new level of respect for my professors. – Kar Masia Apr 04 '16 at 20:39
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    Being tired after teaching is normal. My parents are teachers and they warned me I would be exhausted the first few courses, and they were right. It does get better, teaching is work, so I am still tired after teaching, but no longer exhausted. – Maarten Buis Apr 04 '16 at 20:52
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    Did the students that got crappy grades give you a poor report? Did the A students give you glowing reports? If this is the case then I would take all this with a grain of salt. – Autistic Apr 04 '16 at 21:12
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    I don't know. It's anonymous. I didn't give As. The ones who got As, deserved the grade. – Kar Masia Apr 04 '16 at 21:14
  • Whenever I have been called upon to teach - as a relative expert, not a "education professional" - those who are interested in the subject give me a high rating, whereas those who have been instructed that they must be taught but have no actual interest give me a low rating. Just my experience. YMMV. – Magoo Apr 05 '16 at 13:16
  • Playing devil's advocate: without pre- and post-tests, you don't know whether or not you were just a weekly irritant students had to endure. Maybe some didn't bother doing an honest, negative review if they thought it's hopeless. Perhaps many already knew the material and just moved on. But students expecting education would rightly feel deprived (of time, money), be vocal about it, and do poorly. The key is to do evaluations that go beyond the "smell test" (level-1: course evals), and go into testing efficacy (level-2: pre & post-test). Even better is retention down the road (level-3). – mal Apr 06 '16 at 07:41
  • Regarding my comment on April 4, see the top of page 3 here (= p. 12 of the .pdf file), where it states that about 50% of all students enrolling in college algebra (at a college or university in the USA) DO NOT receive an A, B, or C. – Dave L Renfro May 06 '16 at 18:29

7 Answers7

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Evaluations only tell you whether your students liked you or not. Your main goal, however, is to have students learn the material and develop their intellectual skills, not to have them like you.

Have experienced colleagues sit in on your classes and give you feedback, and have colleagues look at your assessments and the students' performance on them (with appropriate attention given to how you prepared the students - at an extreme, assessments mean something different (but not nothing) if you've given the students the questions and answers in advance!). This will give you much more useful information than student evaluations.

Alexander Woo
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    Just being liked is not educational. That said, I have found that a certain amount of charisma and likability helps with connecting to students and forging an educational relationship. I'd say evals tell you some less reliable info about one aspect of teaching. From my recollection as a student, many of the best teachers seemed to create the most polarized opinions among the students. – Todd Wilcox Apr 05 '16 at 02:48
  • I totally disagree. At least I, as student, have never evaluated a teacher based on whether I liked him/her or not. It may have had a slight influence, but I think that any student can understand that it is not useful to do this for a teacher you like. Therefor I think in general, we don't. – Tim Apr 06 '16 at 15:10
  • Thank you so much for the comments! If I ever teach again, I will do two things: give evaluations throughout the quarter and ask my advisors to observe my teaching. – Kar Masia Apr 06 '16 at 20:00
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From the OP's comments:

Evaluations the students gave the OP:

[...] there are like 3-4 students with really low evaluations.

Grades the OP gave the students:

I had about 20 who received As, around 12 Bs, around 10 in C range, 1 D and an F.

I don't know if I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like in a class of 44 students, about 8% gave very poor evaluations, while the other 92% gave very high evaluations. I would say that there's some good news and some bad news here.

  • If 92% gave very high evaluations, then clearly a lot of things are going right.

  • To be unsatisfied with such high evaluations shows, in my opinion, totally unrealistic expectations.

  • The grade distribution described here is extremely inflated. It's hard to know what this means without more context. It's possible that this is at a school that has extremely inflated grades in general. (This kind of extreme grade inflation is fairly common in non-STEM courses at expensive private schools that have highly selective admissions.)

Student evaluations are basically measures of two things: (1) whether the instructor did what was expected (showed up for class, knew the subject), and (2) whether the student got the grade they wanted, without an onerous amount of effort. Evaluations are not sensitive measures of the difference between an average teacher and a great teacher.

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    Those are the grades he gave not the evaluations he received. – Joshua Apr 05 '16 at 03:39
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    @Joshua: Yes. Students' evaluations are often based on how satisfied they are with their grades. –  Apr 05 '16 at 05:27
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    In my university the evaluations are requested before the exam. I this way the student simply doesn't know his grade and cannot change his evaluations depending on the grade he expected. However this also means that a teacher who does a test that doesn't match his course level or program will not receive feedback from the exam in the evaluation. – Bakuriu Apr 05 '16 at 10:41
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    Where does the 92% figure come from? Even if B is considered a “very high evaluation” (which it’s not where I’m from; it’s good but not great), that's only 72%, and if we include the Cs, we get 95% rather than 92%. That grade distribution looks inflated to me, but not “extremely” inflated. Considering the complete absence of cultural context in the question, though, that is merely applying my own limited experiences and biases—just the same as that is all your answer can do. We do not have nearly enough information to make even the qualified judgments you make. – KRyan Apr 05 '16 at 13:57
  • @KRyan If you add up the grades, that's "about" 44 students. "3-4" gave poor evaluations. 3/44 = 0.068, 4/44 = 0.09. (.068 + 0.09)/2 = 0.079 which is approximately 8%. – DCShannon Apr 05 '16 at 16:59
  • @DCShannon Ahhh, ok, that makes more sense. – KRyan Apr 05 '16 at 17:00
  • @Bakuriu: In my university the evaluations are requested before the exam. Does "the" exam means there is only one exam, which is the final? This probably varies a lot. In my courses, I usually give 4-5 exams per semester. –  Apr 06 '16 at 04:31
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    @BenCrowell No, one exam per course. I should have written "the evaluations for a course are requested before its exam". – Bakuriu Apr 06 '16 at 05:35
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I would not sweat over it (not yet!). Not because ONLY 58% of students filled the evaluation form and definitely not from teaching your first course! Wait till you teach more courses, gather more data then re-evaluate from there. Teaching requires experience and experience comes with time.

Remember this, how many professors did you have when you were a student that you did not like? Did you not like them because you did not like the course itself? Did not like their personalities? Just because they were mean? Got a bad grade with them? Had you do too many homework, etc. the point is, many students (especially undergraduates) tend to be somehow moody when filling evaluations. I fear sometime that many of these evaluations are based on the professor's charisma, personality, the way s/he dresses, popularity than actual teaching.

One thing you can do is to collect informal evaluations every 4 weeks (or so) of the semester. So, you can see and re-evaluate your teaching methods sooner/faster. This can be done by sending online surveys to the students that let them post their reviews anonymously (You might wanna check your dept.'s rules for this first". Or maybe have short conversations with few students (A-student, B-student and C-student) to get some feed backs. Perhaps you can ask a fellow faculty member to attend your class 1-2 times to critique your teaching methods.

The Guy
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  • Thank you so much! If I ever teach again, I will collect evaluations throughout the quarter. And you are right! I can remember at least two professors that I evaluated harshly, and regretted later. I am trying hard not to take things personally! – Kar Masia Apr 04 '16 at 20:10
  • Sure thing! It is a journey, get the best out of it and stay positive. – The Guy Apr 04 '16 at 20:14
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Another interpretation of the results is that, it being an introductory course, was attended by people who had prior knowledge and some who had not been exposed to the content before. Those who rated you well may have been from the former camp, and found the material easy. Those who were from the later may have found your teaching to be less than effective.

On the other hand, the opposite could have been true. Take, for example, a business school that requires their Information Systems majors to take an introductory "Information Systems" class that is also required of all business students. The material could, at best, be remedial or even detrimental to covering more advanced topics in the same field because of the introductory course. (For example: Group projects where they end up doing most of the work).

Both of these scenarios are plausible. Another user mentioned getting evaluations throughout the semester. That's good, but you should also collect information about who the students are to make better use of those evaluations.

Do the students have prior experience in your subject?

  • For those with prior experience, how are they receiving the material? Is it beneficial to them? Are you essentially having a few students do a large portion of the classes work? (E.G. From the 2nd example, is there an IS major in every group (if there are group projects) who is doing 80-100% of the group work?)
  • For those without prior experience, is your material helping them? Are assessments enhancing their learning as well? Or are they spending disproportionate amounts of time on the work relative to those with prior experience?

If you can answer these questions, you can better figure out which group of students is giving you evaluations that are positive and which groups are giving you the negative evaluations. From there, you might determine that the evaluations you are giving are too easy/too hard relative to a large portion of the class. Maybe you don't even need to make a decision then. If your findings are that you have a hugely disparate class, maybe your department changes the structure of the course such that more advanced students take another class and more remedial students take another.

mkingsbu
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    My first thought also was: probably these two types of evaluations are coming from two very different types of students. – Kimball Apr 05 '16 at 14:25
  • I think the class was designed for majors. But it's an intro level class and non-majors are expected to take it. There were several students who said the class solidified their decision to study this major. I received complaints from non-majors but I did have exceptional papers written by non-majors as well.I thought about making it easier but I was also worried that it might do disservice to those who got the material and wrote great papers. I had 14-15 students who consistently commented during class discussions. I thought that was good enough. But apparently not! – Kar Masia Apr 06 '16 at 20:12
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    I'd say that's why you have divergent reviews. You had some students who were very passionate about the field (they majored in it). Among those non-majors who did well, some of them probably had some kind of experience in it, but decided to major in it. The negatives likely came from the non-majors who may have had neither prior knowledge nor interest beyond taking it because it is required. I had a personal experience like this in my undergraduate. It was VERY hard because not only was I learning something I had no interest in, I was expected to perform as if I was majoring in it. – mkingsbu Apr 06 '16 at 21:10
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I've found that good teachers tend to be both liked and disliked - liked by those who see what they are doing and how they are handling the classroom, or for fairness, or for actually wanting students to benefit and putting in effort, disliked by those who want to skip it and want a teacher who's just marking time and putting in the hours, isn't tight on the class etc.

Mediocre teachers tend to get 'blah' average. If you were a poor teacher my guess is the polarized bit wouldn't include a lot of 'good's. That to me says something worth noting. Polarisation itself isn't the issue. But someone who can't get a chunk of above average ratings (consistently) may need to look at themselves in a way that you might not.

That said - 100% agree with previous comments too. Get some teachers you respect to watch and rate your work, and not just as a once off. But be aware teachers like anyone can get into a rutt or have different personalities and ways (not to mention teaching can get incredibly politicised and has its fair share of "One True Way" -ers), so consider anything said rather than assume its all automatically correct and decide for yourself.

Also ask your students each year - "I rate how I do too" and ask them for one thing they like and one thing they would like you to do differently. It will teach you things - and teach them that rating ones own performance is no bad thing, not a threat or criticism, not something only people 'above' do to people 'below' in a hierarchy of privilege and judgement, and a decent basic model for the future to do that for their own benefit if they wish, and example of an adult willing to do so. That if nothing else is education.

Stilez
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  • Thanks for taking the time and responding. As I mentioned earlier, I will ask my advisors to sit in my future classes (if I ever teach again! :) ) – Kar Masia Apr 06 '16 at 20:13
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Based on the numbers you gave, that really doesn't sound very polarized. In fact, it sounds like you received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Good job!

But perhaps I misunderstood.

If you do get polarized reviews, then two radically different types of reviews would indicate two radically different types of respondents. After all, they were all in the same class, but perceived it quite differently. If you're concerned about whether your students like you, which I think you should be but not every one does, or if there are some high stakes attached to your reviews, like salary, then you'll want to fix this.

Therefore, you'll need to take a close look at any data you have regarding your students and try to determine what this difference could be. It could be preparation, major, years in school, cultural background, aptitude in the subject, or any number of things.

DCShannon
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here's one suggestion:

From the results of the polarized reviews, have you considered the possibility that you showed favoritism towards some students, while neglecting others -- others who were probably very hardworking and dedicated to your course but felt relatively ignored by you?

User001
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