Evaluating Your Students and Yourself

Most professors that I know, including me, have a love-hate relationship with their course evaluations. They find out everything they did right, but students can also be quite brutal in telling you what you did wrong. I find that I gain the most helpful information from my students by asking them to answer the following questions in the comment section of the form:

• What worked?
• What didn’t work?
• If you were teaching this class, what would you differently?

By asking these questions, I now know what the students mean when they tell me that “I rock!” or that I’m “The worst professor ever!”

Student:
I used to think that final course evaluations were a waste of time—nobody reads them anyway. But then I had a TA who took the time to tell us that she reads the evaluations and uses the comments to make the class better for future students. For that section, I spent more time than I usually do on evaluations giving her my honest feedback. A friend had her the following quarter and the TA had, indeed, used some of our suggestions in my friend’s section.