Instructor Evaluations
I was going to blog about this a while back, but ended up never getting around to it until now. Last fall when I was in Utah I taught a couple classes at Utah Valley University as an adjunct instructor. For the most part the students seemed to really enjoy my classes and left really positive comments on my evaluations. These two, however, were my favorite:
"SD" means "strongly disagree" and "SA" means strongly agree. The only SD's I received happened to be from this student. In fact the only responses that were less than an N (neutral) were from this student as well. I'm guess it was either one of the students who sat in the back of the class and never did the reading, or else it was a student who had nearly 20 absences and was angry that he was failing the course.
Luckily, most of my other students gave me much higher marks, and left comments such as this:
This, however, was perhaps the best comment I could ever receive:
I totally agree. I do have amazing hair.
One time I was filling out an evaluation for a teacher I really liked. I quickly filled in the "strongly agree" circles on all the questions. When I went to turn it in, I saw a couple in the pile and they all had the opposite side of circles all filled in. I was confused that anyone could hate the professor...but then realized I had filled in the wrong side of circles and had "strongly disagreed" with every one. I was in a rush, so I just left it and ran to my next class. Maybe that's what happened there with your one harsh student. Very easy mistake to make. haha
ReplyDeleteMy wife had a similar experience teaching a summer BOM class at BYU several years back. She got good or excellent reviews from most of the students (all RMs), but one student said, and I quote, that "he could not stop up his ears enough to prevent all of the apostasy she was teaching." Even though the evaluations were anonymous, my wife said she had no problem identifying who it was. Apparently he had manifested an unfortunate misogynistic streak in class, and had a problem taking instruction from a woman.
ReplyDeletelol. What you need is a good hair cut. But that was a good comment.
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