I have been enjoying the articles about teaching evaluations, and I especially like Paul Trout's lively writing style.

There is little doubt that student evaluations have a profound psychological affect on many teachers, which in turn drives their teaching behavior. I have seen a couple of teachers who were pretty much emotionally destroyed by the process, others who were denied tenure because of mediocre evaluations, and still others who quit teaching so as to not have to deal with the whole thing, which they saw as an unhealthy environment.

Faculty who work hard to try to improve their evaluations are usually unable to do so. It seems the harder one tries the more fruitless the efforts. Like other obsessions the quest usually ends in frustration, anxiety, a sense of helplessness, maybe even depression.

A few years ago I did a little research among my own students, just to explore their attitudes about evaluating their professor. While the students thought they were being fair in doing evaluations, it seemed to me that their overriding factor was whether or not they liked the teacher. This very simple concept did much to explain my own fortunes, good and bad, in twenty years of teaching evaluations. And maybe to a certain extent the recent articles in The Montana Professor are discussing differing views on how to get students to like their professors.

Student evaluations as currently used probably do not measure what they purport to measure, and can be abused by students, faculty, and administrators. I think changes are needed. But in my long-ago undergrad days, when faculty were not accountable to the student-consumers, there were some (only a few) faculty who were arrogant and unfair to a degree that probably no longer exists. So I'm not too misty-eyed over the good old days either.

Sincerely,
Robert Piccolo
Carroll College
May 13, 1998