Students give professors grades of their own

Evaluations are being handed out to students to assess courses and their professors.

These evaluations ask many questions such as what the student’s expected grade is, what the student has learned, how the student could have improved and how effective the professor was at teaching. The scores are computed and then summarized by an off-campus company. After semester grades are submitted, the professor is then given the summary of their students’ comments.

Many students speculate whether their written comments are actually copied from the handwritten form to a typed form. Nora Janssen, secretary III of earth science, can end this speculation. She spends the majority of her time at the semester’s end performing the task.

“It takes a lot of time to type up all the assessments,” Janssen said. “You could easily spend days or more typing all of them up.”

Janssen explained it isn’t that the students write a copious amount of comments, but there is a high volume of evaluations to transcribe. She also adds that other departments with greater numbers of students are under a lot more stress to handle the workload.

Janssen proposed online evaluations to substitute written evaluations. Online assessments would allow students to spend more time on the evaluation process instead of being rushed during the beginning of class. A key benefit would be saving money by wasting less secretarial time.

“I feel that the students’ inputs are not really considered,” said Luke Schmidt, junior accounting major. “Some professors may look at them, but they don’t make changes to their teaching. So it is hard to take it seriously.”

Others, however, think that the evaluations are a useful tool for professors.

“I actually do take (evaluations) seriously,” said Yaw Kyeremateng, sophomore French studies and biology major. “I have a feeling the professors look at it and actually do something about their teaching. However, it seems that most people don’t take the time to write what they feel.”

Whether students write their evaluations seriously or not, some professors do look at them as if it was their grade for the class.

“I use them to reflect on my teaching,” said John Ophus, a biology professor. “(Evaluations) provide us with constructive criticism.”

Ophus went on to say that there is always room to improve teaching. Student feedback is one of the most important tools teachers have to critique themselves.

“The time you think you are the best possible teacher is the time you should stop teaching,” he said.

Ophus also advocates the less formal, but widely-used form of assessment on the Web site www.ratemyprofessor.com. This site allows students to score professors based on clarity, easiness, helpfulness and hotness. This better informs students about what to expect from a potential professor.

“It gives students another option on deciding who to pick for a class,” said Ophus.

 

Be the first to comment on this article!

Add comment


I am not posting spam. I understand posting spam or other comments that are unrelated to this article will cause my comment to be flagged for deletion and possibly cause my IP address to be permanently banned from this server.

Enter the characters in the image above:

log out