Kate Cammack, CfT Co-Director
Have you ever experienced any of the following, when you read through your course evaluations?
Me too. #solidarity
First, it’s worth naming that course evaluations are an imperfect measure of something deeply valuable and important to us – our teaching. There are many scholarly articles on bias in student evaluations of teaching; here are a few and a brief 2023 Chronicle opinion piece. In fact, I’ve had past students play with this tool that shows gender bias across 14 million RateMyProfessors posts. (At least they’ve gotten rid of the chili pepper)
However, student evaluations of teaching can offer some value when we think critically, ask thoughtful questions, filter appropriately, and consider them to be one part of our broader teaching portfolio and story.
In a 2019 Chronicle article, the author suggests helpful contextualization and reframing of comments such as:
- “This class was too hard (or easy)”
- “The grading was unfair”
- “The assignments were confusing or pointless”
- “The professor spent too much time (not enough time) on X”
- “The professor/course was disorganized”
- “This class was boring”
- [general logistics category, including time of class, speed of grading, etc]
It’s worth a read.
At our CfT session on course evaluations in early September, we also spent time:
- reading between the lines and looking for additional clues to help get at the student’s core points, as students often have difficulty articulating aspects of their learning experience
- remembering the role that context plays in how students think & feel about our course, with respect to the course itself (e.g., a non-preferred GenEd course versus an upper-level seminar in their major) and also what students might be experiencing (e.g., election-related stress)
- considering how to approach student comments that included personal details/ad hominem attacks that did not relate to our teaching
- looking for themes & threads across our course evaluations – both repeated offerings of the same course, and different courses that share certain features – that might point to ways that we’ve adjusted to our students’ feedback and/or evolved in our teaching practices
Remember that there are additional ways to get feedback about your teaching and about students’ learning & experiences in your classroom, that you can implement at any time. You might take 5min to try the “start-stop-continue” method, or use an anonymous minute paper to gather students’ response to an aspect of your course. Or, next semester, sign up for a CfT-sponsored Facilitated Course Reflection!
Solidarity in teaching,
Kate
Two quick reads:
Chaplin (2025) Teaching evaluations shook my confidence – until I learned to filter critiques. Science
Whitaker (2019) How to make the best of bad course evaluations. The Chronicle of Higher Education