Why Bother
Another teaching vent for the end of the semester.
So my grades are in, and I just received my evaluations. BSU now uses electronic evaluations, instead of scantron forms, so the turnaround on evaluations is days, instead of weeks or months. Yes, it's unbelievable just how quickly they get these things back to us.
I'm not here to vent about the scores on my evals. My evals weren't great, which certainly doesn't surprise me. They weren't terrible, either; on a five-point scale, my general rating was a 4.11. That is the lowest of my teaching career, but it's still above average. My cumulative average score had been a 4.73, so that is why a 4.11 is low for me. But, in the grand scheme of things, it's not that bad, and these evals will probably never see the light of day. I will look at them and use them to improve, but I'll probably never submit them to anyone else for review purposes.
What I want to vent about is the return rate. Only half of my students bothered to fill out the evaluations. This ticks me off for several reasons: one, ALL of them were in class the day we did evals. What the hell were they doing if not evals? Two, I told them repeatedly that we would be doing evaluations and stressed the importance of evaluations; I also talked with them about the electronic form and how to fill that out. It's not like any of this was sprung on them that very day. And three, class met in a computer lab, so it's not as if I was asking them to fill out the electronic forms on their own time. The form was right there on their computers, and they were given an entire class to complete the form--a form that takes, at most, 2 minutes to complete.
I could understand the poor rate of return if I had expected them to complete the evals on their own time and on their own (or somebody else's) computers. I know some instructors do that, and philosophically, I disagree with that approach. I think class time should be set aside for evaluations, rather than having students do it as "homework" or whatever. I made sure my students had the class time and resources (ie the computers) to complete the evaluations.
And even when it was right in front of them, they didn't do it. That really annoys me. It's hard for me to read that as anything but laziness, which is why it annoys me so much. I don't know, maybe they had problems figuring out the forms or something. But I approved the form before it was sent to the students, and I didn't find it to be confusing at all. It was identical to the old scantron form (except for the obvious fact that it was online). And half of them did complete the form, so if others were having problems, they could have asked the people around them for help. It just boggles my mind that they didn't fill out something that was right in front of them, something they had been told about for weeks, something whose importance had been stressed--a form that would take about 90 seconds to complete. I simply don't get it.
I'm very curious to see how many completed the separate evaluation that I created specific to the course, a paper form which asked a few questions about the readings and assignments, what worked in the course, what could be improved, etc. If all of them filled out that paper form, then maybe it really was a computer issue with the electronic evals. But if only half (or less) filled out the paper evaluation as well, then it seems to me that they just didn't want to be bothered. And that annoys me. How would they like it if I only submitted grades for half of them? Of course, they don't think about it that way.
So my grades are in, and I just received my evaluations. BSU now uses electronic evaluations, instead of scantron forms, so the turnaround on evaluations is days, instead of weeks or months. Yes, it's unbelievable just how quickly they get these things back to us.
I'm not here to vent about the scores on my evals. My evals weren't great, which certainly doesn't surprise me. They weren't terrible, either; on a five-point scale, my general rating was a 4.11. That is the lowest of my teaching career, but it's still above average. My cumulative average score had been a 4.73, so that is why a 4.11 is low for me. But, in the grand scheme of things, it's not that bad, and these evals will probably never see the light of day. I will look at them and use them to improve, but I'll probably never submit them to anyone else for review purposes.
What I want to vent about is the return rate. Only half of my students bothered to fill out the evaluations. This ticks me off for several reasons: one, ALL of them were in class the day we did evals. What the hell were they doing if not evals? Two, I told them repeatedly that we would be doing evaluations and stressed the importance of evaluations; I also talked with them about the electronic form and how to fill that out. It's not like any of this was sprung on them that very day. And three, class met in a computer lab, so it's not as if I was asking them to fill out the electronic forms on their own time. The form was right there on their computers, and they were given an entire class to complete the form--a form that takes, at most, 2 minutes to complete.
I could understand the poor rate of return if I had expected them to complete the evals on their own time and on their own (or somebody else's) computers. I know some instructors do that, and philosophically, I disagree with that approach. I think class time should be set aside for evaluations, rather than having students do it as "homework" or whatever. I made sure my students had the class time and resources (ie the computers) to complete the evaluations.
And even when it was right in front of them, they didn't do it. That really annoys me. It's hard for me to read that as anything but laziness, which is why it annoys me so much. I don't know, maybe they had problems figuring out the forms or something. But I approved the form before it was sent to the students, and I didn't find it to be confusing at all. It was identical to the old scantron form (except for the obvious fact that it was online). And half of them did complete the form, so if others were having problems, they could have asked the people around them for help. It just boggles my mind that they didn't fill out something that was right in front of them, something they had been told about for weeks, something whose importance had been stressed--a form that would take about 90 seconds to complete. I simply don't get it.
I'm very curious to see how many completed the separate evaluation that I created specific to the course, a paper form which asked a few questions about the readings and assignments, what worked in the course, what could be improved, etc. If all of them filled out that paper form, then maybe it really was a computer issue with the electronic evals. But if only half (or less) filled out the paper evaluation as well, then it seems to me that they just didn't want to be bothered. And that annoys me. How would they like it if I only submitted grades for half of them? Of course, they don't think about it that way.
posted by Prof Mama @ 6:07 AM
