Introduction

A key learning outcome in many COLL101 or College Success courses is to be able to demonstrate your agency and personal responsibility for learning. This responsibility for learning includes offering feedback from your perspective as a student.  For example, throughout the academic term, you may be asked by your instructor for feedback about how things are going, what could be improved, and/or what is working; some instructors do this more than others.  Most instructors will ask you to complete the college’s formal course or instructor evaluations by the end of an academic term.  Typically,  course or instructor evaluations are anonymous surveys composed of a series of demographic and other questions about students (i.e. why did you enroll in the course, etc.), how the course or instructor addressed the learning outcomes of the college, and two open-ended questions (which aspects of the class were most beneficial to your learning and what you recommend the instructor add or change in future sections of the class).  Additional questions about the laboratory or online or hybrid nature of a class are also included, if applicable.  Such surveys usually takes 10-15 minutes to complete and may be done on campus with pencil and paper, or online.  Anonymous results of the evaluations are returned in an aggregate summary to the instructor after grades have been submitted at the end of the quarter.

Often, course or instructor evaluations are done in a rush at the end of the academic term, and students have little preparation for the responsibility of offering useful and appropriate feedback.  Many students are overwhelmed and stressed towards the end of an academic term and may have trouble using constructive language or focusing on their experience over the entirety of the quarter when they complete their evaluations.  As a result, the evaluation reports themselves are often not as useful for instructors or the institutions as they could be. This short reading addresses some possible misunderstandings and inexperience around course or instructor evaluations by explaining how such evaluations are used and reported, and some of the issues around course evaluations in regard to anonymity and bias.  The reading ends with a practical list of recommendations for how you can make your course evaluations reflect the actual learning experience you have had.

How course evaluations are used

Unlike popular crowd-sourced tools for rating professors, colleges carefully develop their own unique and detailed course evaluations that ask about learning in various ways.  These help colleges assess if students are learning and instructors get information about what works and what can be changed and improved in their future courses.  At some colleges, course evaluations may also be used for evaluative purposes for employment status (i.e. promotions such as tenure, periodic reviews, etc.).  Faculty seeking jobs elsewhere may even be asked to provide course evaluations from previous courses (Nowak, 2019).  Thus, course or instructor evaluations may be a valuable part of a college’s assessment of programs, and course and instructor evaluation processes, while also offering feedback that can be utilized by instructors in a relatively quick fashion for improvement, or for validating beneficial course designs.

How course evaluations are reported

While formal course evaluations are completed near the end of an active quarter, instructors receive these after the quarter has ended and final grades have been submitted. (What students write on course evaluations do not affect their grades in any way, nor can an instructor see an individual student’s evaluation.) The instructors receive the quantitative results in aggregate form, meaning that the numerical data from the evaluations are counted and averages are provided to the instructors.  For example, the report may tell an instructor that 80% of the students who took the survey believed they would pass with a particular grade, and that on a scale of 1-5, the average score for the students’ assessment of “Instructor was prepared” was 4.3.  Qualitative results are shown as typed text.  For example, under the question, “Which aspects of the course were most beneficial to you?” an instructor may receive a list of sentences or phrases such as: “The class discussion. The library. The writing process. Extra credit options.” or “I liked when examples of previous projects were shown.”

Anonymity + respect

One notable feature of most formal course evaluations is their anonymity. This means you do not write your name on your evaluation or any identifying information. By design, being able to submit anonymous course evaluations gives you, the student, the opportunity to be honest about your learning experiences without fear of reprisal. Anonymity ensures fairness and respect for your feedback.  However, the anonymity does not mean that colleges want you to use the formal evaluation as a venting session against a professor or a course.  This can happen when feedback is offered from behind a veil of anonymity. However, inflammatory, non-constructive, and even vague statements without merit or support are just not very useful to instructors or the college itself.  Sometimes, comments are offered unkindly. Comments on course evaluations are much more likely to be taken seriously by the college and the instructor if they reflect respectful language and tone, and they are constructive. Remember, your instructor wants to learn about what worked and didn’t work for you during the quarter. The anonymity is to protect you, the student, but it is your responsibility to use that protection respectfully.  You might think about the feedback you receive from your professors every day, which is not anonymous, yet is delivered professionally and constructively. That feedback is meant to be useful to you, to help you improve your skills and capacities, and to re-direct you if necessary. You should offer the same.  We are all humans here, and how we say what we say matters.  Respect is a two-way street!

Constructive commenting

A comment such as, “I love this class” is admittedly nice, but it isn’t very specific or detailed.  What did you love about the class specifically?  Giving even one or two specific examples provides invaluable feedback for the instructor.  What if the comment said something like, “I love this class – the discussion boards really pushed me to think on a deeper level, apply class readings, and interact with other students when I am usually not comfortable in-person talking to others.”  That is a much more informative and useful comment!

A comment such as, “This class had too much work for an intro level class!” provides a little more insight, but can you elaborate?  What assignments were too much work and what are you comparing this against?  Different disciplines and courses inevitably have different workloads, particularly depending on the student’s interest and experience.  For example, a student going into the medical field would likely be challenged by a chemistry class, but find it interesting, worthwhile, and valuable in the path to their chosen field.  A student taking it because they needed a lab class to graduate, but was interested in social sciences might find it an extremely difficult class and the workload high and unreasonable.  So different perspectives lead to different evaluations of courses as well.  What if instead the comment said something like, “This class had a lot of work and I was really challenged by the lab writeups since I am not a science student”?  That would provide a lot of useful information and some context about what the student’s experience is in the discipline.

What the literature tells us about biases and course evaluations

Type of Class

Is the class you are evaluating one that you look forward to or is it one you looked upon with dread?  Is it a fun elective or one that you are required to take?  Is the course something you are already good at and interested in (thus likely lending to an easier perception of the class) or is it something you are not interested in and struggle with from the beginning?  These factors can influence your excitement, engagement, and even your evaluation of the instructor’s teaching.  Perhaps you remember the idea of a “productive struggle” as a path to learning.  Being pushed out of your comfort zone and challenged in a hard class or one that wasn’t your first choice may bring about a good learning outcome for you, yet so-called hard classes or instructors of such classes are often evaluated more harshly than easier ones. It is also widely accepted that social sciences and humanities instructors are generally rated more highly than math and science instructors (Patrick, 2011).  Possibly, the general fear that many students have of these disciplines and “not being good” at them is already setting a precedent of anxiety that carries over into perceptions of how effectively the instructor is teaching.  So, the kind of class you are taking and evaluating may bias, or affect, how you think about it unless you pay attention and reflect deeply about what you learned while you are doing your evaluation.

Similarly, classes in which students expect a lower grade than they perhaps wanted may also result in lower ratings of the instructor despite obvious learning and advancement in course knowledge.  So, regardless of the grade you are expecting in the course, it is valuable to think beyond the grade.

Finally, after Clayson’s extensive review of student evaluations (2009), the author suggests that the type of learning being measured during the course can also influence instructor evaluations.  Subjective evaluations that incorporate feelings and memorization (a skill familiar to most students and thus acceptable to most) are often rated higher than those with objective learning such as concepts and analytical skills.  Clayson concludes that “instructors who are teaching students to think, and to stretch mentally and professionally, could actually be penalized” in course evaluations (2009, p. 27).

Race and Gender Bias

It is also vital to evaluate an instructor’s teaching practices and course design without regard for their race, gender, physical appearance, age, etc.  Though most people do not think they are judging/evaluating on these latter characteristics, research strongly supports that this is widely done, even if subconsciously (Boring, 2017, Mitchell and Martin, 2018, Sprague and Massoni, 2005).

Relatively few studies have examined race biases; however, given that racism is an ongoing issue in society, it would make sense that this would find its way into student evaluations.  For example, white instructors have been shown to receive higher ratings than instructors of minority group backgrounds such as Hispanic or Asian American (Anderson and Smith, 2005), while Black instructors receive even lower ratings than those associated with other minority groups (Smith and Hawkins, 2011).

In regard to gender bias, much research has been done over decades indicating that women are evaluated lower for doing the same quality or effectiveness of teaching (Boring, 2017).  Students often have subconscious gender role stereotypes associated with males and females, and a study of an online course reveal this effect especially clearly (MacNell et al. 2015).  Females tend to be associated with adjectives such as warm and nurturing while males are expected to be challenging and assertive.  Numerous studies have suggested that when women instructors stray from stereotypical gender roles (i.e. being assertive), they receive lower ratings (Anderson and Smith, 2005, Basow and Silberg, 1987, Freeman, 1994).  Additionally, to achieve similar higher ratings equivalent to their male counterparts, women instructors are often forced to strive to the higher expectations that students demand of female instructors, including formal preparation and organization, as well as interpersonal relations (i.e. one-on-one contact time during office hours) (Bennett, 1982).  In other words, women often must do more than their male counterparts to get the same ratings.  Women are also often expected to be easier graders and more lenient.  When they do not act this way, students may evaluate them lower than they would for the same action done by male instructors.

What you can do to write constructive, kind, and appropriate course/instructor evaluations

Consider your tone

Would you say the same things you are writing to someone’s face?  Does your professor interact with you like you are interacting on your evaluation? Put yourself in the shoes of an instructor when evaluating – both constructive feedback for improvement and validating comments on a job well-done are welcomed.  Provide specific details if possible and avoid vague and disrespectful comments.

Be credible

Think about the story that your course evaluation tells. Is there substance there?  Is there consistency between what you indicate is your effort and what you relate as your experience?  The instructor can only benefit from your comments if they have validity. Do your quantitative responses match your qualitative comments?  In all honesty, if you stated on your evaluation that the course was so-so and it bored you, and you reported elsewhere on the evaluation that you spent just 2 hours of time spent on the course and expect a D+ in the course, is your comment that the course is boring really very useful? What would a professor be able to do with comments like that?  On the other hand, did you mark that you spent 15 hours a week on the course, and completed the labs with your fullest effort, and you expect a strong B grade?  If so, then you probably have some constructive feedback to offer about the course content, or design, or delivery, and you might have something to say about how to make the course a little more engaging.

Offer constructive, actionable, and detailed comments

Do you notice when instructors offer feedback that it is generally about how what you’ve done, or shown, or argued for or against?  It also often offers suggestions for how to improve.  The comments are substantive and often actionable.  You can offer the same. For example, consider “Why was a particular assignment so intellectually stimulating, or how did your experience with a particular class activity prepare you for the next one?”

Focus on the learning

Remember that the difficulty level of a class or an expected low grade in a class may not be related to learning.  Ask yourself: “Even if my grade doesn’t reflect it…did I learn?  Was the teaching effective? How did I learn what I learned?”

Check your unconscious bias

We know that subconscious judgments are common when evaluating instructors.  Iowa State University added language to their student course evaluations to include the following, “Women and instructors of color are systematically rated lower in their teaching evaluations than white men, even when there are no actual differences in the instruction or in what students have learned” (“Calling Attention,” 2019).  Just this added instruction on evaluations helped women instructors achieve higher and more reflective ratings.  Thus, when evaluating instructors (either through CIEs or other electronic word-of-mouth sites that rate professors), try to remain objective to the learning and course design provided by the instructor instead of their gender, appearance, race, age, etc.

(For other tips for how to provide useful, appropriate comments: University of Michigan 2015)

References:

Anderson, K.J. and G. Smith. (2005). Students’ Preconceptions of Professors:  Benefits and Barriers According to Ethnicity and Gender. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 27, 2, 184-201.

Basow, S. A. and N.T. Silberg. (1987). Student Evaluations of College Professors:  Are Female and Male Professors Rated Differently? Journal of Educational Psychology, 79, 3, 308-314.