Rant about evaluating teaching in higher ed
It's annual review time, which means it's my annual time to remind all of us in administration that our institutional evaluations of teaching are generally garbage. They range from a scant few nuggets of useful info, to incoherent, to empty, to biased, to career-destructive.
Teaching is most, if not all, of what most faculty are paid to do. Yet our evaluation instruments (whether student or peer), are generally only vague gestures at useful information. There's not a lot of value in looking at student course evals with <25% response rates, yet, as is the case with most NTT and tenured faculty, since there's no peer evaluation, that's all you've got to go on.
In an increasingly data-driven age, this paucity of information is inexcusable.
I've been a full-time prof for 25 years, and a teacher of college students for 33. And I'm still waiting for a fair, yet thorough, consistent, and equitable system of evaluating teaching.
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Rant about evaluating teaching in higher ed
@dkompare Could be worse. I know places where a criterion is how close your exam scores are to the "standard" grading scale with a B+/84% mean and mode. Would you want the students' parents to complain to the department about your class being too hard, would you?
