Student Evaluations

Which administrative idiot thought up the concept of student evaluations?  OK, the general idea is fine - give the students a chance to say a few words about the classes they are taking and the professors who teach them.  After all, there are (sad to say) some professors out there who are dull and boring because, frankly, they are dull people who are bored to death with what they teach.

But hasn't administration caught on to the fact that students now see evaluations as ways to "punish" professors?  At the end of the last semester, I heard one girl comment as she passed my desk.  "He (referring to some poor unnamed prof) shouldn't have told me I couldn't do the assignment over.  Now I'm going to give him a crappy evaluation."  Her friend replied, "I'll write a bad one too."  I felt sorry for the guy  (whoever it was) because I know students have done to to a lot of professors - including me. 

Students see themselves as consumers.  They don't hesitate to tell you what they want when they want it, and if you don't give it to them.....well, you'll know it when the evaluations come back to you.  For the full-time tenured professor, bad evaluations are probably just lunch laughs, but for the adjunct, it can mean the difference between teaching that course again, or never teaching it as long as you live.  And there's nothing you can do.

Ignore the bad evaluations, and your department head thinks you don't care.  Bring it up, and you look guilty as hell.  You can't get out of this gracefully.  Try to explain that the students ganged up on you because you gave them all bad grades on a group project, and you look like the bully throwing the poor hard-working students under the big, bad bus.  When those innocent looking students didn't just throw YOU under the bus, they got in and drove it themselves.  You can feel the bruises from the tires, but your department head doesn't see them. 

Student evaluations are playing right into grade inflation.  Be a buddy; cut the students all sorts of slack; laugh off late, shoddy, and missing assignments and give them nothing lower than a B, and you've got them writing a glowing (maybe) evaluation.  But when you read those evaluations, you know you sold out to a system that values the students' input over your ethics, education, and integrity.  It's sad, isn't it?