Comments on: rate your professor

By: cwillse.net » We’re In a Warehouse

cwillse.net » We’re In a Warehouse — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:01:16 +0000

[...] was some interesting conversation about student evaluations over at Scatterplot a bit ago. One thought I’d add to the conversation — in some cases (I’ve had this [...]

By: Cliff

Cliff — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:08:32 +0000

“4 out of 6″

What? Since when do we rate things on a scale of 6? What’s wrong with plain old 0-5 or 1-5? Six? How pompous.

By: laurabethnielsen

laurabethnielsen — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 12:26:57 +0000

I got the lowest evals of my teaching career - like yours, from great (5.5 ish) to merely good (5.0 ish), but still it’s owie. Two comments in a row: “I needed much more guidance writing my thesis” and “I didn’t need any help with my thesis.”

If you read my blog I told you that last quarter one of my students told me I focused to much on editing details. This quarter, “Also, it would have been nice to receive some editing from the advisor/editing comments to strengthen the writing itself.”

By: sherkat

sherkat — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 02:02:29 +0000

We can’t even require faculty to conduct them, though juniors (of course) can be penalized for failing to do so.

By: nonevent

nonevent — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:35:47 +0000

kibitzer…you just made my day…that is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long, long time. CLASSIC.

By: shakha

shakha — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:12:13 +0000

ASM publishes UW course evaluations. Anyone can access them online (though it takes a little searching). Not what folks write in, but the scores. So you can check that out. YOu can also see the grade distribution of sections (so you know if a prof is easy or hard). Here at Columbia we have CULPA which is an anonymous ratemyprofessor-like service. I suspect the student who was nasty to me wrote in a review, either that or another student didn’t like me.

By: scorrell

scorrell — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:10:08 +0000

my favorite was from one of colleagues who had a student write that “the professor is biased towards those who did the readings.”

By: kibitzer2

kibitzer2 — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:26:11 +0000

My current fave, from last fall, is “Professor Kibitzer makes me feel like I am stupit.”

By: jay141

jay141 — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:20:58 +0000

Sucks that they’re on-line, but at least access is limited to the Northwestern community. I was googling someone at Penn a couple years ago to find his e-mail address and stumbled upon his course evals. Now that really sucks. Perhaps they’ve remedied that problem (assuming they view it as one).

By: Kieran

Kieran — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:03:17 +0000

My favorite feedback from last year was, “Don’t insult the Scottish. We may not have preserved the written word during the Dark Ages but we are a proud people none the less.”