{"id":4337,"date":"2026-01-29T14:12:05","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T14:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=4337"},"modified":"2026-01-29T14:12:53","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T14:12:53","slug":"overreacting-to-students-negative-criticism-and-trying-to-stay-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2026\/01\/29\/overreacting-to-students-negative-criticism-and-trying-to-stay-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"(OVER)REACTING TO STUDENTS\u2019 NEGATIVE CRITICISM (AND TRYING TO STAY COOL)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I wrote a while ago a post<\/a> titled \u201cStudents\u2019 Ratings of Faculty: How It Works and Some Ideas to Improve It (sic),\u201d criticizing how the survey to rate our task as teachers is organized. Since then I\u2019ve been pestering the Dean of my school to do something about this matter. Other teachers must have been protesting, too, because there is now a committee to work on improving the surveys. Today, my post is not about the surveys per se, but about the emotional reactions that students\u2019 negative criticism generates. For, you see?, teachers have feelings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I usually end my subjects with a conclusions session, in which I review the, so to speak, narrative arc of my teaching, and invite students to offer feedback. This time I took a blank page to class and told the students that, since I don\u2019t know their handwriting (all the exercises are done at home using computers), they were welcome to offering anonymous feedback for me to consider. The class rejected my offer, but a couple of students made suggestions, verbally and in public: 1) I should use more time to teach how to write reviews in class (last year the class told me I used too much) and 2) I should offer feedback on the reviews in class, and not only through the tutorial I email after returning all marked exercises (I replied that with the emails I reach everyone, whereas class attendance is around 60%). So, I went home quite content, thinking that the students were satisfied. I was myself very satisfied, as the three reviews out of four (80% of the final mark) I had already marked were between correct and very good. There had been a few problems but they had been ironed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          It turned out that, although I have a handful of very positive emails, a sizeable portion of the students were not satisfied with the subject or my teaching. I know this through the surveys that my school runs and which, as is customary in colleges around the world, university students can fill in anonymously. I happen to be, as noted, a human being with feelings, and can\u2019t help being deeply hurt by comments that, in some cases, show great animosity. I\u2019m not used to social media haters as, possibly, students are, and perhaps my skin is thinner than the situation requires. Anyway, after 24 rather awful hours, I did what scholars do: research, in this case about how university teachers handle negative comments. It turns out that there is plenty and this is a burgeoning field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Students\u2019 surveys of teachers appear to be a 1920s invention of US colleges in the context of private higher education (see<\/a> d\u2019Apollonia & Abrami, \u201cNavigating Student Ratings of Instruction,\u201d 1997). We owe to H.H. Remmers, professor of Psychology and Director of the Division of Educational Reference at Purdue University, the development of the idea and the formalization of the method and of the area of research, both in the mid-1930s. The surveys expanded in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to students\u2019 demands for their opinions to be considered. Between the 1970s and 1990s teacher surveys by students were used informally to improve teaching and as tools to evaluate teachers regarding tenure, promotion, and hiring. In 1993, a formal tool, the College Student Survey, was introduced by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). This is not limited to teachers\u2019 rating; it is, rather, a tool that unified surveys at a national US level. See the results (for 2024) here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For the Spanish context, where I work, I have read Tejedor & Jornet\u2019s \u201cLa evaluaci\u00f3n del profesorado universitario en Espa\u00f1a\u201d (2008<\/a>). They identify five key moments:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. University-oriented and controlled assessment (1981-1989).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Implementation of the Decreto de Retribuciones (1989) by which extra retributions were added to wages on the basis of teaching quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Approval of the Plan Nacional de Evaluaci\u00f3n de la Calidad de las Universidades (1992).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

d) Implementation of the accreditation system for hired staff and of the national habilitation for civil servants with the Ley Org\u00e1nica de Universidades (LOU) (2001).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

e) Creation of the Agencia Nacional para la Evaluaci\u00f3n de Calidad y Acreditaci\u00f3n (ANECA) and of the corresponding regional agencies (2002), such as Catalan AQU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The current national and regional system follows the directives of ANECA\u2019s Docentia<\/a> programme, but this is much larger than just the student\u2019s evaluation. In my last application (in 2021) to obtain the supplementary retribution for teaching granted by the Catalan agency (AQU), there were five sections, only one of which was based on students\u2019 surveys. In fact, I can hardly make sense of my own trajectory, since I have six teaching assessment exercises validated by the Ministry and AQU, a total of 30 years, but I can\u2019t recall how I was assessed before 2001, when the current system was implemented following LOU. What I know is that whereas students\u2019 assessments were said to be a sort of extra in 2001, they are now a mandatory element that may result in negative evaluation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I\u2019m not writing, however, about their impact on our salaries but about the distortion that surveys impose on teacher-student communication. Anonymity, as we know from peer reviewing, is open to animosity. So, while we, teachers, were being schooled in a softer pedagogy that demands we give friendly, encouraging feedback (a pedagogy I endorse and do my best to follow), students have been encouraged to use surveys to lash out at teachers and subjects they don\u2019t like for whatever reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          It is most likely the case, as Pekrun et al. argue<\/a> in a 2010 article, and Emma Kennedy paraphrases<\/a> in her blog that \u201cStudents cannot function as objective evaluators; their feelings about your teaching are affected by a variety of strong factors which are unlikely to be under their control.\u201d I will insist that a lifetime of social media usage, often anonymous, has encouraged Gen Z students to be as emotional as they wish before a screen. I hardly think that students can be objective, but my query is why they have been allowed to be so openly subjective and even cruel, disregarding the feelings of teachers. This is NOT feedback, this is\u2026 vendetta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          So, what advice are we being offered to cope with negative comments on course evaluations? Basically, the classic stiff-upper-lip reaction (\u2018keep calm and carry on\u2019), or the Spanish \u2018te aguantas\u2019 (chin up and swallow up your chagrin!). Please, note that since surveys results come when classes are over, there is no chance to reply in person to criticism. I did consider sending a collective email, and ended doing that but to thank students for their positive criticism, without mentioning the negative views. I saw no point in acknowledging them, as this is not expected from the system or the students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Maryellen Weimer<\/a> speaks of \u2018overreaction\u2019 in a personal case very similar to mine, and advices the following: 1) Step back; 2) Look again later, but with objectivity; 3) Decide what you\u2019re going to do; 4) Talk to a trusted colleague; 5) Talk to a few students; 6) Recognize that you are not alone. She also recommends Hodges & Stanton\u2019s 2007 \u201cclassic\u201d article<\/a> \u201cTranslating Comments on Student Evaluations into the Language of Learning,\u201d which I have not read yet. I\u2019ve taken steps 1-4 and 6, but since I don\u2019t know who\u2019s not happy about my teaching I can\u2019t talk to them. I\u2019m, by the way, running an experiment: I\u2019m openly telling my Department colleagues about the negative comments I\u2019ve received, and although they commiserate with me none has acknowledged having received any. This puzzles me: either I\u2019m the Department\u2019s black sheep (me, who used to be popular!!) or they are too embarrassed to discuss this question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I\u2019m starting a new subject in about two weeks\u2019 time, with half the class that gave me the negative comments, and, as you may imagine, my self-confidence is at a low approaching burnt-out. A point I must clarify is that I very much suspect that the central problem is that the subject I\u2019ve been assessed for, Contemporary English Literature, is a compulsory fourth-year subject. Many of our linguistics-oriented students very much dislike having to take yet another Literature subject, which, besides, did not appear in the syllabus they registered for a few years ago. That, of course, is not my fault. Introducing Contemporary and making it compulsory was a joint decision of the whole Department. I just volunteered to teach it. Perhaps that\u2019s enough to make me a hateful person, I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          As you can see I\u2019m not addressing the elephant in the room: am I, then, an awful teacher? I could take the negative criticism and reply to each complaint one by one here, but I see no point. You, my reader, would still not know what kind of teacher I am, for I could be lying. Of course, I honestly believe that I am a very committed teacher who does care for their students and that I am doing my best for them. I had some very bad teachers in my student days, and I really think I\u2019m nothing like them, but, obviously some students totally disagree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I feel that I am very unfairly judged through means that do not give an adequate measure of how my classes work. The additional problem is that this anonymous feedback offers no useful tips. I will certainly consider for next year the requests (politely given in class during general conversation) about using more time to teach how to write reviews and offer feedback on them, but what can I do with opinions such as \u201cin this subject I have learned nothing\u201d or \u201cif attendance were not compulsory nobody would be in class\u201d (there is much worse\u2026)? I just think that anonymous opinions should be written as if they were addressed to the teacher face to face in their office, once assessment is over and both students and professors are free to speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          My hope is that, if not now perhaps in the future, students look back and conclude that, after all, they did learn something from me and that you don\u2019t have to necessarily like your teachers. I also hope that, if they ever become teachers, they can manage to be much better teachers than me and please their students. As for the next semester, I\u2019m considering whether to stop reading students\u2019 surveys to protect my mental health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I finish today with my deepfelt thanks to the Head of Department and the BA Coordinator for having listened to me, and helped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote a while ago a post titled \u201cStudents\u2019 Ratings of Faculty: How It Works and Some Ideas to Improve It (sic),\u201d criticizing how the survey to rate our task as teachers is organized. Since then I\u2019ve been pestering the Dean of my school to do something about this matter. Other teachers must have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1137,1053,34],"tags":[1428,1426,1427],"class_list":["post-4337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literature","category-students","category-teaching-tools-and-rules","tag-anonymity","tag-feedback","tag-students-surveys-of-teachers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4338,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4337\/revisions\/4338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}