The Torment of Teaching Evaluations

Question: I work twice as hard at teaching as anyone I know, but I still can't get good student evaluations. I've tried outlines and keywords on the board, handouts, individual meetings, midterm evaluations, peer observations, lecturing more, lecturing less. Some student comments are so harsh and demoralizing that I put off reading my evaluations until school breaks, when I have time to be depressed. Is it possible that my low evaluations stem from personality issues that I can't do anything about? Am I alone?

Answer: Certainly you are not solo. Ms. Mentor's mailbag is full of complaints about student evaluations -- none of them from students. Faculty members feel that they are cheated, mistreated, and misunderstood. Often they're right, for most evaluation forms are so vague and perfunctory ("Concerned about students -- rate 1 to 9") that they do nothing to improve teaching. More often, they become weapons to get rid of untenured profs who have made enemies. No one has ever really agreed on what makes a "good teacher," and Ms. Mentor still grieves for Socrates, who taught his students to question everything, and wound up dead instead of tenured.

But your risk is smaller. You just need good evaluations, and Ms. Mentor can tell you how. (Naive and idealistic souls may wish to stop reading at this point.)

Simplest of all, you can give higher grades, which do correlate with student ratings. You can use more hand gestures, modulate your voice more, and walk while you talk. Students give higher evaluations to teachers who are good-looking or very dramatic. This is called "the Dr. Fox effect," named for a hired actor who purported to be "Dr. Fox" and who gave a nonsensical university lecture in a wildly entertaining style, and got outstanding student evaluations for his brilliance.

In one notorious study, those who saw just a 30-second soundless video of a teacher in action gave him virtually the same ratings as the students taking his course -- who'd spent a semester reading, writing, thinking, and talking with him. Smile warmly for the first 30 seconds of the first class in January, and you'll get good scores in May.

(Ms. Mentor directs doubters to grab the nearest search engine, type in "Teaching Evaluations," and seek research by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal; Ronald H. Naftulin, et al; Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci; Elizabeth M. Lieux; and Susan Basow.)

You'll also get better evaluations, Ms. Mentor knows, if you put on a more entertaining show. Skip the top-down or banking model of teaching, where you pump the knowledge into students' heads, and they feed back what you've fed them. That doesn't sell now, except for the rare charismatic lecturer who's chock full of gossip, humor, and new information.

Study standup comics to learn how to open a class. Troll the Internet, television programs, and newspapers for hip references you can make to crazed celebrities, moral issues, fights about air and land and parking, new songs, gadgets, heroes, and goats. Encourage students to be problem-solvers: You're a CEO who controls millions of dollars: What can you do with your money? You're a Civil War general whose army has no shoes: What are your alternatives? You're a celebrity caught shoplifting: What will this do to your career? What should Joe Millionaire do next?

Your story and followup questions can be entertaining, or explosive: "Is Saddam Hussein worth 15,000 American lives, the number of body bags ordered by the Pentagon in February?" The point is to get students to be active learners, talking to each other -- not just writing down what you say.

Learn students' names, create discussion circles, assign hands-on group projects, require in-class presentations, encourage role-playing. Today's students learn by doing -- making a Civil War-era quilt from info they find on the Internet, writing a sonnet or song, cooking the quail in rose petal sauce from Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate. You may fear that you're somehow denying your students access to The Expert (you). But especially if they are teenagers, most of them would really rather interact with each other than listen to you.

That may be especially true for you as a woman professor, for students expect women to be nurturers and men to be authority figures. Your mean-spirited evaluations may be from students who regard you as a gender-role violator. But if students feel loyal to their small groups and committed to their work, they're more apt to rate you highly, as the one who made it possible: "I really worked my butt off and got an A. Hurrah for Professor Jane!"

Is this pandering and coddling? Perhaps. But it is less blatant than toting wine and cheese or a glamorous guest speaker on the day the evaluation forms are given out. And it's less corrupting to the conscience than giving everyone A's and being prominently featured in Pick-a-Prof.com, which publishes professors' grade distributions.

Finally, suppose you do the gesturing, the smiling, the small groups, the food bribes, and the inflated grading, and you still get bad teaching evaluations, which may mean you won't get tenure ... and you still approach the classroom with in a state of terror and dread. In that case, Ms. Mentor gives you permission to quit.

No one has to teach.

Your energies and talents may be more appreciated in business, for instance, where you're interacting with task-oriented adults instead of restless, hormonally charged teens. There is no shame, Ms. Mentor decrees, in moving on. But there is shame, and waste, in persisting in making yourself miserable. That will always get you a bad grade from Ms. Mentor.

Question: Will you ask your readers to explain why tenured professors are, in my humble opinion, such a bunch of miserable whiners?

Answer: Yes.

SAGE READERS: A heterogeneity of letter writers sent their epistles to Ms. Mentor this month -- including a blogger who made Ms. Mentor's column the first entry for her day; a carper who dislikes Ms. Mentor's writing style; and a dean who confesses to loving his treadmill ("I'm rather at home on it -- now"). Ms. Mentor has heard from irate or bemused Bulgarians, Catholics, and oligochaetologists, and other correspondents who wonder whether they must buy lavish gifts for their dissertation committees (no); whether a lowly adjunct should correct a powerful senior prof's ignorance about Spider-Man's anatomy (no); whether a professional woman should change her last name upon marriage (no); and whether youthful mistakes will follow you forever and derail your career (no).

Ms. Mentor reminds readers that her tome (listed below) includes advice for every stage of an academic career, from graduate school rites of passage to the nose-thumbing joys of retirement. Further, her archive on this site now contains some four years' worth of perfect wisdom.

As always, Ms. Mentor invites gossip, questions, and rants, for this column and for a second volume in the works. She particularly welcomes correspondence on the machinations of hiring committees. She rarely answers letters personally, and individual consultations are not possible. Anonymity is guaranteed, and identifying details are always scrambled. Your colleagues may not even recognize your gender.