Course Evaluations
Course Evaluations
PLEASE READ THIS FIRST
When I was a student, I remember wondering how much other students enjoyed (or didn't enjoy) a class I was considering taking; whether they got anything out of the
class; whether it was a tough class; and so on.
When I was an instructor at Washington University in St. Louis, I ran across what I thought was a neat-o idea from the standpoint of the students (and the faculty -- at least indirectly).
Each semester hundreds of booklets appeared all over campus. These little books contained the student-evaluations and selected comments for the previous semester courses.
Because I would have appreciated this sort of thing when I was a student, I decided to make something like it available to students for the classes that I teach here at RMU. Some of the
comments don't make sense to me, others include requests to change the course that just cannot be done (e.g., using up lecture time to go over the exam - you can come to my office to go
over your exam), and others have resulted in some changes to my courses. For example, I posted lecture notes and PowerPoints for a few semesters and grades PLUMMETED. While it might have
valued some students (probably the ones who would earn an "A" for the course without them) it seemed to hurt most students. Why? My hypotheses include: (1) Students thought they didn't
need to go to class now that I provided the lectures, (2) Even if they went to class, they could now relax and play with phones, nap, talk to friends, etc. rather than take notes, (3)
Some students mistakenly assumed that the notes were all they needed to look over or study to prepare for exams, (4) With notes provided, students didn't have to process the material very
deeply (it's better to take notes in your own words) so they didn't learn it as well as they could. Probably there are more possibilities, but I learned my lesson and won't post lecture
notes of any sort any more. Similarly, requests for "study guides" won't ever happen because that's the STUDENT'S job to be making this throughout the semester. Of course, sometimes the
request for a "study guide" is really a request to know what material will be covered on the exam. That is NOT responsible education. That's called teaching to the test. My job is to find
out how much of the presented material you seem to have acquired/mastered. The estimate is messed up when teachers provide information about what is going to be on the exam.
Robert Morris University has switched from the original SIRS-II survey form a couple of times now. That means there is some inconsistency in how my courses have been evaluated. Rather than
try to blend everything together, I've just started new summaries (with older ones to be found below the newer ones). That should explain why some of the links below will yield slightly
different looking pages. The older (SIRS-II) form was not student-comment-friendly (so I created my own "comments" form that I once used every-so-often). Also, you will see that for the
older summaries I included information about the final grade-distributions for all of those classes. This is a pain in the rump to do and I don't do it any more. Sorry.
You probably already know this, but course evaluations are sometimes not very accurate for at least three reasons:
- Students can use the evaluation to vent some frustration out on an undeserving professor. In this case, negative scores may be exaggerated for effect.
- Students may just want to get the evaluation over with and so might not put any real thought behind their responses.
- Occasionally students get caught up in less relevant aspects of the experience (such as the professors use of candy-happies, sense-of-humor, etc.) and so may score a course and the
professor more highly than deserved.
My evaluations probably reflect all of these (and probably other factors as well) to some degree or another... Generally, though, the larger the number of people evaluating the course,
the more likely these things tend to average out in the end. So you have pretty much all the evaluation data to examine at your leisure.
Yeah, yeah... whatever, let's see those evaluations:
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[As of the end of the Fall 2023 semester, I have taught at least 3,123 different students at RMU.]
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