9 Dec 02, i think

I just bought a car.  At the end of the exercise, I was asked to fill
out a a "customer satisfaction questionnaire."  The folks who handed
it to me wanted to make sure that they got all 5's, the high score,
and if I wasn't going to give them a 5 they wanted to to know -before-
I filled it out, so they could respond to it.  I declined to fill out
the form, because it was clearly used as a bludgeon; it had to be
perfect (all 5's) or there was hell to pay.

Sound familiar?  I'm not sure of the formal name of those things we
pass out that are supposed to evaluate our "teaching," but they are
really just "customer satisfaction questionnaires," eh?  And when the
customers aren't satisfied, there is hell to pay.

.....

-I- sign all my evaluations; i.e., the students know who evaluated
their work. Evaluation forms must be signed to have validity; not the
other way around.  That I would use a signed evaluation to "get back"
at a student is the basest sort of accusation, and I resent it. These
anonymous "customer satisfaction questionnaires" encourage the
unprofessional, uncollegial, uncommunal behavior that we espouse NOT
to want.  In fact, the anonymity leads the evaluators to believe that
the process is not important, no matter what we say about it.

And exactly what are the evaluation criteria of these thingies?  I
-must- carefully explain to my students the performance standards, so
that they know what mark to expect at the end of the term.  It seems,
as there are no specific objective measurements associated values on
the forms, that they mean whatever the author intends them to
mean.... shades of Alice, eh?  So, for instance, whether or not a
student agrees that I "used effective evaluation mechanisms" or
whatever, is independent of what I did.  

Please don't start with "students know good teaching when they see it"
like it's some sort of instinctual response, when we know that nothing
could be further from the the truth.  I maintain that freshman (at
least in the first term, but probably for the entire year) should
-not- evaluate teaching.  Freshmen only have their high school
teachers as a comparison, not university professors, as they now see.

Here's one way to look at it. (Numbers simplified to make the
arithmetic easy.)  Assume one semester of college equals one year of
high school.  High school classes meet 5 days a week for 50 minutes
for 40 weeks. That's 10,000 minutes of "face time." A university class
meets 3 days a week for 50 minutes for 15 weeks. That's 2,250 minutes,
less than 1/4 of the "face time."  Where is that time made up? The
library, the lab, the desk.  Make the high school year shorter, as it
probably is, to about 30 weeks, and you still have a 2/3 reduction in
classroom hours. Making one semester of college equal to one semester
of high school [an embarrassing statement that I present for the sake
of argument] still leaves over 1,000 fewer minutes of class time.


Summary:
  0.  Customer satisfaction has little to do with actual performance. 
  1. "Agreement" is not a valid evaluation criteria.
  2. High school (teaching) is different than college (teaching).
  3. Anonymity breeds contempt for the process.

....and while I'm at at, in my 18 years here -no one- has ever asked
me, formally or informally, attributed or anonymous, to evaluate my
chair, my dean, the academic vice-president, the president. This says
more about the true nature of this "evaluation" process than the
entire preceding rant.