Student evaluations

[purplepandas]

Hello,

As ever, I am so fed up. Took on a unit this year (big unit cross programmes) at the last minute due to staff illness. I have other admin positions, this should not have been my task but there we go. Spent so much time revamping it and making it more assessment focused (it was too complex). Unit evals back, two comments saying I was not great on answering questions in class (one saying I was dismissive). I literally put on a whole Q&A session for the students (not present before), answered so many forum quesitons, put on an interactive session. If I thought I was dismissive then fair enough but I honestly was not. I am telling myself that some feedback was the complete opposite and my work got praised, that very few students completed it (less than 10% easily) and that likely those that completed it had axes to grind. But still, it bloody stings. I have no more to give at work any more, this year has finished me off due to absysmal staffing and lack of resources. I don't know why I bother trying.

Sorry for the rant.

This has just popped up on my active threads and I'm not an academic, but been a student for too many years of my life!

Ignore it. I mean, if it's going to impact you professionally in any way, then point out that it was less than 10% who even filled it in, plus it's not your core course.

But as a student, there are always, ALWAYS dickheads on the course who use these evaluations as payback, usually for some small slight.

I'd look at the overall feedback on a bell curve: discount the outliers at both ends and focus on the bell. Some found it above satisfactory, presumably, because they took the time to give a positive evaluation. And they're outliers. And then let's say some really found it bad, all of it bad. Well, they're entitled to their views, but overall, they're outliers too. Over 90%, however, of students were satisfied with your course. Maybe they didn't love it, but it was satisfactory. And we know that because when people are up satisfied and given a chance to complain, they often do!

So I think that overall, you have a LOT of satisfied students, or at least students who weren't unsatisfied. Well done!

*..when people are UNsatisfied...

There's already another thread on shitty evaluations . I had a terrible one this year - and then a great one from another one from another cohort who were taught the same material who loved it. What can you do. Don't take it to heart, you know this.

Hello from the op of the other thread.

Evaluations suck.

I also wish to not care but it's just a horrible process. I feel the more experience I have, the more I have to do behind the scenes stuff and admin stuff and stuff the students don't see or appreciate. Meanwhile the temp lecturer who teaches one module a week can put all the hours and effort in, and claim he's been told he's the ' best lecturer they've ever had' at our uni. (12weeks teaching experience x1 module). This is my so called 'team'.

Have a and a good swear!

I sympathize OP.

These kinds of things used to make me extremely upset, but now I've got better at dealing with them. I'm referring specifically to comments that ar blatantly untrue, as seems to be the case here. If I put up a very extensive section on assignment help on the portal, dedicate two tutorials to help with the assignment, make references in every class to how specific content relates to specific assignment questions, and still some students say that "no help was provided with the assignment"... well it's not my fault, isn't it? It's like you were always bang on time and a student wrote that you were half an hour late every time... objectively and demonstrably false, and it is not even worth speculating whether the student made it up out of malevolence, or they couldn't be bothered to engage with the course at all, or whatever.

@Mumteedum I think it is definitely the case that sometimes students do see temp lecturers as the novelty, fresher and younger and more exciting than us the old boring regular faces. And sometimes (not always) I've seen some temp lecturers encouraging this. Which I can partially understand, if they are frustrated because they haven't been able to secure a permanent post.

In my case a final year dissertation student of mine argued this year that I was apparently not qualified to supervise her dissertation, and insisted of me being replaced with a temporary lecturer. I had given her extremely positive feedback on a piece of work, but suggested that she might explore research methods more akin and pertinent to our discipline, rather than exclusively borrowing method from other diciplines.

MEQs undermine lecturers. They make us answerable to students. And long experience, MEQs/NSS surveys and the like, have taught me that what students think they want for a decent education and 'student experience' isn't what they necessarily need to get the best out of their education.

Why, indeed, would they be the people best-placed to know that? Lecturers are employed for their expertise, experience and generally long-standing research profile - this is even applicable to new PhDs - in their specific scholarly fields. We are not 'facilitators': we are teachers; academics who happen to know more about these matters than do undergraduates.

MEQs consistently rehash the same themes. Number 1 is that no matter how much assessment guidance they are given, it's never enough.

I have a module in which each week's seminar work builds the steps needed to fulfil the assessment brief. Every single week. They had a suggested template for the work (my lecturers would never in a million years have given me this; I'd have been expected to find my own structure). Yet still the MEQs revealed that students didn't feel supported enough to fulfil the assessment brief, that they didn't understand what was required (they had a podcast, written brief and template: what more could I have done short of writing the thing for them?) and still this apparently wasn't enough. Ironically enough, many of the complaints came from serial non-attendees. When that became apparent I stopped taking them remotely seriously.

A second point it's worth bearing in mind is a statistical one, courtesy of the union. Students will always rate female lecturers more harshly than male ones.

You can't please all the people all the time. The MEQs and NSS seem negatively worded, in such a a way as to invite students to tell far more experienced and expert lecturers how they think they should be doing their jobs. It's just another way to undermine lecturers, and the recognition of this has helped me develop a thicker skin.

IME, when you invite criticism, you usually get it.

@SerafinasGoose thank you for your post. It's absolutely spot on.

IME, when you invite criticism, you usually get it.

There is a place for feedback of course, but the MEQs/NSS questions are framed so negatively. Plus, feedback being all online also tends to be rushed and poorly thought out. The frustration is that by phrasing MEQs such that they invite criticism, not only are we inviting students to devalue their lecturer’s expertise, we invite them to devalue their whole learning experience. That feels v counter productive and I wonder what sort of employee are we creating for their future employers?

I have been pushing back with some minor success. Our head of student surveys is excellent and actually listens. So there's been a project to give students guidance on how they should approach feedback. It.may not have impact but I feel at least somewhat heard.

I also gave feedback on the guidance and they changed it before rollout.

Plus you inevitably get students who will give you a poor NSS because you didn’t pass poor work.

I told my team not to look at the students evaluations because they weren't paid enough to take it and they'd quit if they did.

Unfortunately I had to look myself as I was permanent.

What I discovered is the harder I pushed them the less they complained. It was weird.

I'm now an instructional design. If 10% completed the course you're winning in real terms.