Hurts So Good?: Evaluation and Consolation

Many of us may slightly dread the end of semester when we know that students are being encouraged to rate us as…what? Teachers, parents, entertainers, psychiatrists, fashion models, human beings? When the completed ratings reach our inboxes, we are perhaps nervous, and then hurt or even angry at some of what we read. One unfavourable comment can obscure twenty favourable ones, and a preponderance of unflattering comments can be crushing, whether we are new or grizzled veterans. Veterans may be wounded personally, but the consequences may be less grave for them than for part-time or untenured instructors. Adding insult to injury, we know that student evaluations are unreliable, especially if their recipient is young, female, not white and so on (Chávez and Mitchell, 2020), but it is also clear that they will remain central to hiring and retention decisions, because of the ease of administering them and the (illusory) objectivity of data that numbers provide (Kornell, 2020).

Why can an anonymous comment from someone who by definition knows less about the topics in the course than we do have an effect far beyond what its original creator may have intended? One reason may be that it activates the imposter syndrome which many of us (even veterans) feel, and which professional academia actively encourages by its emphasis on competition and achievement. Again, though not exclusively, such feelings of insecurity can be stronger in traditionally underrepresented demographics in academia (Weir, 2013). As academics, our jobs are typically not merely jobs but our very identities. Negative, hostile, unkind comments can strike at our tenderest psychological parts. The very term “evaluation” amplifies this, implying that your human value can somehow be diminished by negative evaluation.

Perhaps we should read our comments more as impressions. And while “negative”, “hostile” or “unkind” tend to blur together, the terms are not synonymous: we are not perfect teachers – who could be? – and negative evaluations might ultimately help us in a way that merely hostile or unkind ones do not. It is tempting to read comments once, feel defensive and dismissive, lock them in a drawer and never look at them again, but if read with selectivity and detachment, separating the merely negative from the hostile or unkind, they can be helpful, if one has the right expectations, grounded in recognition of a common humanity in which neither we, nor our students, are flawless.

So lay the comments aside but revisit them, focusing on objectively classifying both positives and negatives: do they focus on content, organization, or teaching style (Reiner, n.d.)? We are all individual humans: what pleases one may not please another, but patterns or trends in comments may be useful. If no clear trends are apparent, consider what you had hoped your students would get from the course, what you and they did, and your honest assessment of what all of you did: what connections and discontinuities exist between your reflections and the comments? After all, we should surely care about what our students think, just as our students should care about our classes (Kornell (2020). We can foster this goal in how we approach administering evaluations, telling our evaluators that we care about their opinions, when expressed sensibly, honestly, and reflectively, if we are to use them to implement improvements in future courses. Student evaluations do not tell us everything, but doubtless, you are not as bad as some may claim, and possibly not as good as others suggest.