Reposted from the DesMoines Register.com; By STACI HUPP • [email protected] • December 13, 2010. Accessed at: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/201012130405/NEWS02/12130319
Dennis Clayson’s college students have picked apart everything from his “impossible” tests to his choice of neckties.
The University of Northern Iowa marketing professor says he doesn’t take criticism personally when students grade him on teacher evaluations, but he has wondered: Do they always tell the truth?
The answer is no, Clayson and a Southeastern Oklahoma State University marketing professor found, in what they say is the first study of its kind.
About a third of students surveyed at both schools admitted they had stretched the truth on anonymous teacher evaluations, which teachers at colleges circulate at semester’s end. A majority, 56 percent, said they know other students who have done the same. Twenty percent of participants admitted they had lied on the comments section of the evaluations.
The good news: Students fib in some cases to make their instructors look good, the study shows. The bad news: More often, they do it to punish professors they don’t like.
“Students are very generous, but they’ll zap you,” said Clayson, whose study will be published next year in Marketing Education Review, an education journal. He said the study was produced at no charge.
The findings are sure to stoke an age-old debate over the fairness of teacher evaluations, which factor into pay raises and promotion and tenure decisions. The paper forms are as much of a classroom tradition at semester’s end as final exams, which take place this week at Iowa’s state-run universities.
Clayson has spent years evaluating teacher evaluations, which direct students to assign a number grade – 1 to 5, for example – on topics ranging from how much they learned in class to how accessible a professor was. Evaluations also generally set aside room for written comments. Among the worst comments Clayson has seen: “Die, you son of a bitch.”
The stakes are even higher in classes where instructors dumb down their classes or inflate grades to boost the odds that students will like them. The practice is widely acknowledged by professors and has been studied by researchers, including Duke University statisticians who found professors who give better grades get higher marks on evaluations.
Paul Trout, a retired Montana State University professor, said he became a vocal critic of teacher evaluations when he noticed he was teaching fewer and shorter books in his English classes.
“I was more and more concerned about the grades I gave out, more concerned about how I was coming across to my students,” he said. “I started to realize that all these things seem to circulate around the teaching evaluation form.”
Trout remembers one student who stopped coming to his class after a month but showed up at the end of the semester “to throw whatever he could at me on those evaluation forms.”
Katherine van Wormer, a UNI social work professor, said students have taken aim at her political views and her jokes. Van Wormer doesn’t believe students are dishonest, but she said their evaluations should not be anonymous.
“It’s encouraging people to stab others in the backs,” she said.
Trout believes professor evaluations are a public relations tool designed to assure parents, taxpayers, politicians and donors that faculty members are held accountable.
Dan King, director of the American Association of University Administrators, said the forms are a more accurate way to gauge professors than, for example, asking their faculty counterparts to observe a few classes.
“The student has seen the professor’s performance class in and class out,” King said. “The student is one of the consumers of education, so it’s reasonable to ask, at the end of a course, ‘What did you learn, and could it have been done more effectively or more efficiently from your perspective?’ ”
Derek Schmitz, an Iowa State University sophomore from Audubon, said he doesn’t lie on evaluations, but he skips them for professors who have tenure – essentially, a job for life.
“You basically know they’re not going to get fired, and they’re not going to listen,” he said.
Professors who interact with students get higher marks from Schmitz than teachers who “stand in front of the class for an hour.” Schmitz also grades teachers on workload.
“Right now I have a final that’s worth 75 percent of my grade, which is ridiculous,” he said. “That’s probably my worst experience so far – unless I do well on the test.”