Horrendous and very personal feedback from student

[belle40]

Hello,

I have been working in HE for a number of years so I am familiar with student feedback mechanisms for modules. Today I have had my first experience of direct extremely personal and offensive feedback from a student in a PG cohort.

I work in a professionally regulated programme and so the feedback ( which is anonymous) would contravene the professional behaviours expected by the students.

A summary of the feedback is presented at a larger student / programme meeting although specific personal comments are redacted by the PL.

I wondered if anyone else had dealt with this and any advice to manage the cohort going forward?

Many years ago I worked for the Open University. Student forums were a technological innovation at the time and it seemed great that there was a means for them to communicate with each other. After returning one assignment I saw that one student was complaining, in none too kind terms, about my grading and inviting others to join in with their complaints. I contacted my line manager and was told 'just ignore it', which in the end was one more thing that led to me giving up working for the OU - they were providing a forum for students to complain publicly about teaching staff with no right of reply. Terrible!

It depends what was actually said.....

I think you're maybe underestimating the scale of this task - 'casting an eye' over the feedback for every module in a university of average size is not a minor thing that someone could just fit around their normal tasks. As someone has said, students wouldn't be pleased to know their feedback is being filtered by HR - and nor would staff, who would also, I suspect, be concerned by what else HR was doing with that knowledge and data.

I think your students need some education in what constitutes appropriate feedback, especially if that is something that they will have to provide in their future profession, to protect others and themselves.

If they knew …. They might use more appropriate language. It’s not OK to abuse people in feedback.

When I worked as a lecturer we did get some completely irrational odd bods. One of my colleagues got an official complaint made against her because a student believed she had been singled out and was being deliberately targeted by my colleague. It took us ages to work out who the student was as it wasn’t anyone she regularly taught. The whole vendetta scenario was entirely in the student’s head.

This. Also, why ask for feedback if the risk is so high?

HR couldn’t give a fuck about a lecturer getting inappropriate obscene feedback. Really they couldn’t. And they generally know next to nothing about research. University HR people are usually completely hopeless at best and antagonistic towards academic staff at worst.

Nice to know, thanks. Getting a good idea of the HE culture - contemptful.

I think the appropriate response hugely depends on what it was that was said.

Racist/sexist/violent language?

Criticism that your lectures are dull?

This is unprofessional. I work in HE also and this would be investigated at the highest level. The person in question would be under a full investigation. If necessary, sanctions would be imposed.

How can there be sanctions if the feedback was anonymous?

I do think there should be a way (for IT, not individual lecturers / departments) to be able to identify anyone who violates workplace dignity policies through this kind of individualised feedback process, but I don't see that this is currently the case. Whenever I've been aware of nasty feedback being given, the lecturer has just been expected to ignore it, which is very difficult given the nature of what is sometimes written. One colleague had module feedback when she returned from maternity leave saying that she'd let herself go and needed to pay more attention to her appearance and also wear some better outfits. You can imagine the effect that would have on anyone, nevermind someone with a baby who was getting by on very little sleep.

in my line of work our feedback is anonymous, but in exceptional circumstances the author can indeed be tracked. we work with Questback and Microsoft Forms. I suppose it depends what the format is

I don’t think academics are on the whole contemptuous but we get a lot of contempt directed at us. Like the Professional Services colleague chairing a meeting about student welfare and examination mitigations who said at the end of the”A good short meeting because you academics didn’t talk to much”. She wasn’t making a joke.

Most students I teach are lively - young eager to learn and very polite. Sometimes too polite! But occasionally students who are struggling and also lacking in self-knowledge project their anxieties onto us.

And university management, generally staffed by people who have never taught undergraduates - or left their teaching part of their career a long time ago - are all about the “student experience.”

Good high level learning is hard. It should be. But a lot of people nowadays would rather this weren’t the case.

@LittleBigHead has it spot on. I had this sort of feedback, from a student I caught cheating, but it wasn't anonymous. It was emailed directly to me. And I was essentially told to suck it up. My boss at least had my back on the comments about the quality of my teaching.

No, but misogyny can also be perpetrated by women.

We don’t even know what the comments were, people are just commenting that research shows that feedback is often sexually and/or racially biased.

Full article: Understanding the impact of biased student evaluations: an intersectional analysis of academics’ experiences in the UK higher education context
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2024.2306364

Thanks all. Not good to hear this is widespread.

The PL and HOD will speak to the student cohort about suitability of feedback. It really matters for the professional field we are preparing these students for. I.e. students can fail in practice for inappropriate/ unprofessional Comms.

Lots of support from the team who also agree that we remove the current feedback system and provide a different mechanism of feedback that is more suitable.

I can't find who asked the q about overall impact to me directly so sorry I can't link back to your username but this is highly personal and serious enough for a student to be taken into a professional suitability process (if we knew who they were). I also regard this type of behaviour as the worse kind of cowardice and do not go to work to be abused.

The overall context will be very clearly spelt out to the cohort group and I would hope that there would also be some peer management of this as there are several sensible and committed students in the cohort group.

We shall see how impactful this all is.

Thanks again for all of your feedback and messages.

Good luck @belle40 And it’s great to hear that your colleagues are so proactively supportive. Time for some of your students to grow up, it seems!

I have only just spotted this but have had this a number of times.
It is extremely common and the feedback levels are notoriously (and backed up by research) poorer for women, minorities, and older academics. Especially older women and especially those whose beliefs don't tally with students'.

I have actively made a decision not to read student feedback, even for modules I'm module coordinator.

Yes, I started ignoring the module comments. When I was in grad school in States I adjuncted at a community college. I had a student shove me against a wall because he was failing my course (non attendance) and was angry about it. As no one witnessed it, nothing I could do, and no support. After that, I realised that administrators don’t give a darn about students making nasty comments about academics or really much about their safety, and I quit worrying about the evaluations.