Here at Pasadena City College, we have a two-tiered system of evaluation. Tenure-track professors are evaluated in all of their classes each semester. Those with tenure are evaluated in a smaller number of their courses, and only once every three years. I’ve had tenure for nearly a decade, so I’m getting evaluated this autumn for the first time in three years.

I am very mindful of the utility of student evaluations. Though I wish they were done closer to the end of the course, I appreciate enormously the opportunity they present. Like most folks, I don’t take the “ratemyprofessors” site seriously anymore; it’s apparent to all that anyone can rate a teacher online. I could be giving myself all the positive ratings, and a few men’s rights advocates could be writing all the negative ones, and there’s no way to ascertain whether a rater has actually taken the course they are evaluating. In-class evaluations are different. I step out of the classroom, and our department secretary (or her assistant) administers the surveys. Students fill in bubbles and make comments. Eventually (usually around May, it takes forever) the results are tabulated and I am given a sheet with my overall numerical averages as well as a typed sampling of the comments. (I don’t always get the actual sheets themselves, perhaps to protect me from trying to judge who wrote what by their handwriting.)

I’m confident I’m a good teacher, and at times that confidence slips dangerously close to hubris. (My post about the educrats serves as a case in point.) But the fact that I feel I have little to learn from those with Ed.D. after their name does not mean I believe I have no room for improvement! I’m a better teacher today than I was a decade or so ago, and if I continue to take constructive criticism and push myself hard, I’ll be — by grace and effort — a better teacher still a decade from now. My students are smart folks, and after they’ve taken a few of my tests and sat through a few of my lectures, they’re pretty darned good at identifying my strengths and pointing out where it is that I can improve. A good teacher can always become a better one, and I’m eager to continue to get better.

When I first started teaching, I sought advice from my parents, both college professors with years of evaluations behind them. My father told me to ignore two kinds: the ones that were too excessive and worshipful in their praise, and the ones that were clearly nasty and designed to wound. My Dad, who taught philosophy, said that if the student eval said “Prof. Schwyzer is another Socrates!”, he laughed and put it aside. If an eval said “Schwyzer is the worst professor I’ve ever had, and shouldn’t be allowed to teach”, he did the same. But if a student said “He does a well, and I liked b, but I really wish he had done x instead of y because it would have made things clearer” — then my father paid close attention to the constructive criticism.

The college doesn’t pay much attention to a few laudatory or a few negative evaluations. They just crunch the numbers, and as long as you don’t have an overwhelming majority of your students rating you as “poor”, they don’t intervene. (Actually, for the tenured ones, even in the case of huge numbers of poor evaluations, they rarely intervene. For better or worse, getting rid of the tenured for anything other than a felony conviction is very difficult.) I know that some of my tenured colleagues don’t look at their evaluations at all, while others study every line, their egos inflating and deflating in response to each compliment and complaint. I fell into that camp for a long time myself. Today, I’m a little less vulnerable to either flattery or calculated meanness (one still sees both from time to time). Today, I read the evals carefully, looking for meaningful feedback. I’m happy to say that I usually get it, and am able to incorporate it in one way or another into my future courses.