This post is extremely difficult to write without sounding whiny and defensive, but I do need to write it, particularly considering that I don’t seem to have dealt with the matter of students’ ratings of faculty in almost thirteen years of blogging. So here we go.
I have access to the students’ assessment of my task as a teacher for the last ten years, but as far as I recall, my university has been assessing teachers for many more years, though I don’t recall ever rating my teachers (I graduated in 1991). In my university students’ ratings are mainly used as indicators of problems to be tackled, but they don’t have a negative impact on our salaries. Last time I applied for a five-year teacher assessment exercise (to get a small pay rise), the problem was that not enough students had rated me (I passed thanks to other indicators). My Department has the highest percentage of student participation in teacher rating of the School, and that is only 35%. We have been told that students should use 15 minutes of classroom time to rate us, as we did in the past when surveys were done on paper instead of digitally online, but I have not seen this semester more than 35% of my group in class, so that instruction might not really change anything.
The questionnaires that my university uses consist of two sets of questions, one which refers to the subject more generally and another which refers to the teacher’s performance. You can easily see how problematic this set of questions is, leaving aside the matter of not being tied at all to student’s attendance (yes, you might get rated by someone who has never attended your lectures as long as they are registered in your subject). Here are the problems I see in the questions about the course:
1) has the syllabus been followed?: if you get less than 4 (the maximum mark) you still don’t know what the students think is missing.
2) is the course material is well prepared and useful?: which course material? Does this refer to the set books, the handbook, or the other documents?
3) is the assessment system clearly described in the Teaching Guide (or Syllabus)?: again, if you get less than 4 points you still don’t know what students miss in the guide and how to improve it.
4) are the assessment items suitable?: same problem, the points are no indication of any specific problems; some items might work fine, while others don’t work at all.
5) is the student’s workload reasonable?: according to which type of student? I believe it is practically impossible to get 4 points here unless the student’s workload is so light that even the less committed students are happy. If you get a very low mark, then you clearly need to revise the workload but, again, which part?
6) has the student learnt ‘things’ (really!) valuable for their education?: ‘things’, not competences or contents, but ‘things’. Supposing students reply that they have learned plenty, as teachers we still don’t know in what sense. They may be happy with the skills and not with the content or vice-versa.
Regarding the questions about the teacher here are the problems:
1) does the teacher explain matters with clarity? This leads to my own flipped question for students: are you every day in class to judge this? Have you done the homework required to follow the teacher’s explanations? Are you alert and concentrated in class?
2) does the teacher maintain a good communication with students? This is very subjective, teachers click with some students, and not others. If this refers to whole groups, then, as we know, with some there is a very good understanding from the beginning, with others communication is poor also from the beginning.
3) does the teacher tutor students suitably in person or online? We don’t have a tutorial system, so I don’t know what this means; we have rules to be available during our office hours and on email, but no formal tutoring as such.
4) does the teacher make useful comments based on the assessment activities (i.e. gives good feedback)? Again, this requires a flipped question: do students read the feedback notes we include in exercises and check the corrections? Do they always pick up exercises once they have been marked?
5) Is the teacher globally a good teacher? This is an absurd question because the questionnaire should be designed to answer that question without the student essentially expressing a direct opinion. Here the student is basically asked ‘do you like this teacher?’
6) ‘I have learned with this teacher’: here the student is invited to say yes or no, but, surely, whether you learn with a teacher also depends on how hard you study, doesn’t it? Not even the best teacher can teach a student who doesn’t want to learn.
I believe that students’ ratings of faculty can only work if at least 80% of the class participates in it. There is little incentive for students who pass the subject to answer the surveys, and it is quite possible that the 30% students who fill in the questionnaires are those mostly dissatisfied. The surveys, by the way, are carried out before the academic year is over. I assume this is to avoid the final mark to condition teacher assessment, but this is like rating a product on Amazon before it gets home and you see it (I’m not sure the analogy is valid but I hope you get my point).
I have no problem to admit that I am writing this post because this year I have scored below 3 points, a very humbling 2’58. I have just checked that two years ago, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic I scored 3’54, but I am at a loss about how to interpret these figures. My methodology has not changed, though something that has indeed changed is the number of students in class: two years ago I assessed 45, this year I had 60 in my hands, which means less personal attention, worse collective communication and in general more distance between the class and myself (it’s the first time I don’t learn all their names). I knew half-way through the semester that although the final figures for student assessment would not be a problem (15% have not passed, which is habitual), communication was not working. There was a blog post that did not help, and my insistence that class attendance was essential only resulted in even lower attendance.
Now, what worries me is that teacher’s assessment is not discussed, either in my Department or in the School. It might well be that, for example, there are common trends we are missing. I don’t know if my case is punctual, or more general for instance among my age group. I grant that the questionnaires have depressed me, but what depresses even more is that I have been offered no instrument to improve my performance. I cannot ask any of my now former students what went wrong, as this is never done and might embarrass them. I feel a little bit like a girlfriend who has been abandoned and only discovers at the end of the relationship that it was not going well, when she thought it was mostly fine.
I don’t know, in short, what to change and improve the next academic year. Perhaps I need not do anything, and this is just a matter of bad chemistry with a set of students, or perhaps it is time to reconsider in depth what I have been doing in recent years. Just for you to understand how difficult the situation is, I copied from a very successful American university teacher the idea of writing a set of rules for the students and myself that would act as a contract, but that went down very poorly, giving me a reputation for being prissy and bossy from day one. I also tried to be more friendly by introducing myself via a short bio and inviting students to do the same, following this prestige teacher’s suggestion. Only about 12 out of 60 replied to my message.
I believe I can do mainly two things next year to improve my performance, based on the students’ feedback: 1) write a specific questionnaire that all students need to fill in (after assessment is over), 2) establish a system for students to send me feedback anonymously at any point of the course. I was in communication with the class delegate this year, but the feedback I got was not specific enough, and I never got any positive feedback about what worked well. I don’t care whether I get a 4 or a 2, this is not about being popular or well-liked, but about getting rid of the impression that I have no way to discuss what we do in class while the subject is being taught and not afterwards. I will insist that for me this is the main point.
I would like to stress that as a teacher I don’t rate student’s performance. That is to say, the final mark is based on my rating of their exercises, not of whether they are good or bad students – that is totally unrelated because I don’t know how much they do at home independently from me. Teachers, in contrast, are assessed on the basis of subjective impressions, much as we all assess services as customers. As such, I am always dissatisfied with numbers, which is why I read reviews apart from just checking a product or a service’s rating. Students can also add comments to their questionnaires, but they are very few and often very cryptic (what does ‘The teacher is very proud’ mean, or ‘The class could be more dynamic’?). Numbers, in short, mean very little, and I extend this to student assessment, which is nothing without feedback comments from the teacher. I need those feedback comments more than the figure, and I think we teachers need student assessment to stop being absolutely anonymous. We don’t rate students anonymously, a practice that in my view does not guarantee objectivity at all. So, why is all our rating anonymous?
Anyway, message received and I’ll try to do better next year though, as I have said, I don’t really know what parts of my performance I need to improve. I am not saying that I need to improve nothing, as I am more than willing to change whatever needs to be changed provided high standards can still be kept. The problem is that the feedback I have got is totally useless. I just know that students did not like me this year very much but my aim is not to be popular, but to be effective. If I can be popular and effective, that’s great, but my job is to make sure that students pass my subjects, hopefully with As and Bs rather than Cs, and if I need to be more strict and less likeable for that, then so be it.
As I said, this was a difficult post to write without sounding whiny or defensive. With apologies, I don’t think I have managed.