A plea for filling out course evaluations

Under the old system, it was simple. An instructor would set aside the last 10 minutes of a course’s final session and distribute a two-sided paper evaluation form. The instructor would then leave the room, and an appointed student would collect the completed forms and deliver them to the departmental office.

It wasn’t a perfect system. Ten minutes, after all, isn’t a lot of time to think carefully about a course, let alone provide concrete suggestions for changes or say what worked in a course when it worked well. Some students gave no comments at all and simply provided numerical ratings. But the main advantage of the paper evaluation was that most students attended the final session and thus more evaluations got turned in. Yet since we’ve moved to an online system, the response ratio has been distressingly low. The percentage of completed evaluations is now around 50 to 60 percent, and I have sometimes received even fewer. It bears little or no relation to whether students liked the course. In one of my courses last spring, students applauded at the end of our final session. But that translated into a response ratio of only 55 percent for the online evaluations.

I can sympathize, in a way, with the inertia. I spend too much of my life online, and I mostly hate filling out surveys. If you’re a student, you have so many obligations at the end of the semester that a course evaluation must seem like just one more annoying task to get out of the way — or, worse, to ignore. And it seems to have a much lower priority than the things you’re required to do, like taking final exams or turning in term papers. But please consider the broader social consequences of blowing off the task of evaluating a course.

Think of it this way. How would you feel if you didn’t get more than 55 percent of your course grades, simply because some professors didn’t feel like grading you? Quite apart from the fact that you’d have no way of measuring your own progress, it would throw the whole university system into chaos, making impossible applications to graduate or professional schools or fellowships or foreign study or teaching programs or internships or jobs — all those vital institutions that launch you into your life and on which your eventual livelihood will depend.

Something similar applies to course evaluations. They become the basis for teachers’ salaries, promotions and, for many at the lecturer level, continued employment. They are a primary way of enhancing and ensuring excellence in education, and they are thus integral to the university’s reputation. This, of course, will benefit you, the postgraduate, when having a degree from Tufts, as opposed to Shmendrick U., might make the difference in your getting a desirable job you’re applying for.

For me, reading my course evaluations has been vital to making me a better teacher. I find especially useful the written comments, but the numerical rankings are also valuable signals that allow me to work on, one way or another, improving a course. Although I’ve taught for many years, I’m still far from considering myself at the top of my game in the classroom, but each year, thanks to my past students, I get a bit closer. Still, the disheartening depletion of students willing to fill out evaluations has made the array that I do receive seem flat, formless and untrustworthy. While each response is valuable, I no longer have a sense that I’m getting a consensus — and often that makes all the difference in the world.