I am now retired, but throughout my career as a professor I consistently argued that student opinion forms collected in the last week of a course were nearly useless for the evaluation or improvement of teaching effectiveness, though the free-form comments were occasionally useful or at least amusing. I was surprised that an ideal mechanism to evaluate teaching—which I’ve championed for at least 25 years—was not included in Toni Feder’s article “Reevaluating teacher evaluations in higher education” (Physics Today, January 2020, page 24).
Technology has made it simple to keep track of students who took a particular class and to send them an email questionnaire about it a few years later. Did that course have a positive effect on their education—for example, on their preparedness for subsequent courses—or on their careers? Answers to questions like the following would help make that determination:
Did you find the material taught in Physics 000 by Professor X useful in subsequent courses?
Do you ever go back to your notes or textbook from that class to review information because it is important in another course or in your current job?
Did the solution to a problem or exercise in Professor X’s course turn out to be applicable in your current position?
Have you applied a technique learned in Professor X’s class to solve a different problem you’ve subsequently encountered?
In hindsight, would you recommend that a student take Physics 000 with Professor X or with some other instructor?
Students would be unable to answer those questions in the last week of class, but years later they could make a much better and more relevant assessment. In addition, such evaluations are not needed in the short term. By the time a faculty member is coming up for tenure in their seventh year, many students will have taken their courses and graduated.
I made a similar suggestion when I was on my college’s sabbatical committee. A faculty member is generally allowed to take a sabbatical after receiving tenure at seven years of service. When eligible for the next sabbatical, that faculty member should be asked what benefits from the last one were realized during the intervening years. That suggestion was received with the same lack of enthusiasm as my suggestion for evaluations of teaching effectiveness that used a longer-term student perspective.
Although a student will generally know if a professor is unprepared for class or is irresponsible in grading and returning assignments, that kind of information would probably be brought to a department chair’s attention during the semester. A common saying best summarizes what is more important for faculty evaluations: “You don’t get what you expect, you get what you inspect.”1
If instructors know that their performance will be judged by the impact their course has on students’ futures, the debate will change from a survey that assesses classroom experience to a focus on the true purpose of that experience.
