-------THE VISITING PROFESSOR
Student Evaluations Deconstructed

By JOEL J. GOLD

In the days when I was an undergraduate,
nobody ever thought of asking the likes of Feedback
us what we thought about the quality of our
professors' teaching. I'm not sure we'd have
known how to answer the question. It was the
placid '50s; we were an accepting lot. These
days, most colleges and universities require
that faculty evaluations have a student
component. Today's students expect to be
asked to assess their instructors -- and
some view the prospect as the long-awaited
Student's Revenge.

Encouraged by the administration and urged
by the state legislature, my colleagues and
I have solicited anonymous student feedback
for at least 20 years. Toward the end of the
term, we step into the hall while a student
volunteer passes out the forms, collects
them after allowing students 10 or 15
minutes of purposeful writing, and takes
them to a department secretary. Instructors
do not see the forms until they have turned
in their grade sheets.

The student evaluation is a fascinating
medium, open to the use of all critical
methods of assessment, including
Freudianism, Marxism, and deconstruction --
especially deconstruction. Students
interpret gestures, motions, looks -- to say
nothing of comments written and oral -- in
ways that surprise naive faculty members,
all of whom just know they're going to win
next year's teaching award, if not this
year's.

Few of us will ever get the sexist but
enthusiastic evaluation that one University
of Illinois instructor received: "My French
teacher," it read, "is drop-dead gorgeous,
and I think I'm in love with her."

Occasionally, the comments show an acute
understanding of what less-confident faculty
members need to hear. One of my students
added a note to explain a batch of missed
classes: "My absences weren't related to my
instructor's strengths or weaknesses;
rather, they occurred on the days when I
overslept or felt too stupid to appear in
class." One anonymous review concluded:
"Definitely deserves a raise -- my cousin
makes as much as he does cleaning grills on
cars." Another announced: "Dr. Gold is an
excellent dude." I'm pretty sure that was a
compliment, but I've yet to figure out how
to parlay it into a raise.

Sometimes you are faced with an ambiguous
comment that may well have been intended as
a compliment. For example: "Mr. Gold never
fails to be without energy." Hmmm.

Then there was the student who praised my
enthusiasm in the classroom and declared
that he or she would take more courses from
me if possible. But in the next section --
"What changes would you suggest?" -- the
student offered this advice: "While Mr. Gold
was normally very helpful outside of class,
he was from time to time deficient in this
respect. I would suggest that he have as
much enthusiasm outside of class all the
time as he does in class." Unless somebody
slips amphetamines into the drinking water,
I don't think so.

That sort of mixed message is fairly typical
of student responses. One generous review of
my course on Henry Fielding complimented me
on "making some very boring books very
interesting." The student concluded: "My
only suggestion to him is not to offer a
course on Fielding again."

At times, students' complaints are more
specific. After remarking that my class on
the 18th-century novel was "one of the best
courses I have taken at the University," the
critic went on to remind me that "your
students have a few other things going on in
their lives (some of them at least). Nine
books is excessive when most of those books
are lengthy and difficult. ... Also Pamela
is the most worthless book I've ever read.
(That leaves eight.)"

The most cryptic comment I've received still
resonates. Clearly unhappy with my teaching
and my grading, the student concluded: "The
grading style is too harsh for the manner of
teaching. You should teach as hard as you
grade."

I've been pondering that one for years.

Our peers, too, weigh in with evaluations,
and reading what they have to say may tell
us as much about the writers as about
ourselves. While you might imagine that
those who have been teaching for years would
understand more clearly -- and perhaps more
sympathetically -- what younger instructors
might be facing, biases do come through. I
can still recall -- 30 years on -- my
irritation at a comment in a senior
professor's otherwise favorable review of my
teaching: "The young man should lecture more
on the historical and biographical
backgrounds."

I felt I could disregard such transparently
old-fashioned nonsense. But what do new
colleagues think when their gray-haired
peers, dragooned into observing a sophomore
lit class, suggest eliminating perhaps one
or two references to Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, or Stanley Fish from the
introduction to Great Expectations? Might
"old fogey" cross their minds?

Regardless of how colleges evaluate
teaching, everyone's concerned about
evaluation. Interest in improving classroom
teaching through a system of prizes and
financial awards shows up constantly in
publicity releases and alumni magazines for
little colleges and mega-universities alike.

Last fall, as a way of rewarding good
teaching, my university initiated a practice
modeled on that old television series "The
Millionaire." I'm not sure I ever actually
saw an entire episode, but the gimmick was
that in each story, a stranger dropped a lot
of cash on an unsuspecting recipient, thus
changing said recipient's life for better or
for worse.

With money donated by real-life
millionaires, our chancellor, checks in
hand, wandered the halls of classroom
buildings the first few days of the
semester, surprising in mid-lecture some 24
excellent teachers. While the students
gawked and the instructor gasped (or feigned
surprise), the chancellor would whip out a
$5,000 check and pass it to the meritorious
winner, who had been selected in secret. We
all understood that the reward process was
under way, but one of the winners told me
that he had been startled when the
chancellor barged into his early-morning
class. "Fortunately," my friend said, "I
recognized him."

I must admit that I thought what fun it
would have been to deny any knowledge of the
chancellor's identity and threaten to call
the campus police and have him forcibly
ejected. Then I considered how many weeks in
Bermuda $5,000 would pay for.

Unless an individual student was harboring a
grudge for a low grade on a first-week pop
quiz, the students who witnessed these
displays applauded and seemed comforted by
seeing that they were indeed in good hands
for the semester. Or maybe they thought that
the odds for a professor-sponsored party at
the end of the term had just gone up
markedly. I'm not sure whether such publicly
identified paragons of teaching had an
easier or a harder time when their students
finally filled out their end-of-term
evaluations. They might, though, have been
persuaded of their instructor's brilliance
by the sight of all that money changing
hands.

Or -- and having observed undergraduates
over many years, I lean to this scenario --
they might just have wished to demonstrate
that they were not impressed. Over all,
however, the results were just what the
donors and the administrators wanted:
Excellent teaching was being visibly
rewarded and talked about.

But what about "good" teaching, or, as they
might describe it in Lake Wobegon, what
about pretty good teaching? Was that being
rewarded? No, not really. The pretty good
teachers spent an uncomfortable week making
quick forays to the door for hurried glances
down the hall -- "just in case." We -- I
mean "they" -- kept their ears pricked for
chancellorean footsteps out in the hallway.
"What," they wondered, "does money sound
like when it's headed your way?" "Can you
hear a windfall?" And I'm sure I was not the
only one practicing an acceptance speech
just in case the chancellor's bald head
should shine forth in my doorway.

But, in the end, only 24 checks could be
handed out. The winners made their
reservations for Bermuda. The rest of us,
conditioned by decades of Kansas football,
promised ourselves, "Wait till next year,"
and went about our business.

If the new system rewarded the excellent and
at least motivated the pretty good, what
about the bad? "The Millionaire" model won't
work for them. Suppose that just when
Professor X or Y is settling down to a
droning lecture, another yawn on the way to
placid retirement, he or she is found out:
an impostor, no teaching credentials, a
forged Ph.D., pretended membership in a
phony professional organization.

One step ahead of the authorities, the
ersatz professor escapes through the window
and heads for the highway. In the final
scene -- obviously I am modeling this not on
"The Millionaire," but on "The Fugitive" or
this year's "The Pretender" -- we see our
sham instructor preparing to give his or her
first lecture at Mid-Continent A&M, safe for
a little while longer.

Probably very few faculty members can see
themselves in "The Millionaire." Most of us,
however, understand intuitively how "The
Fugitive" feels. That's why we always check
our escape routes when it's time for student
evaluations.

Joel J. Gold is a professor of English at
the University of Kansas.

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Copyright (c) 1997 by The Chronicle of
Higher Education