s" be suspended. One woman purported to speak for others: "Every woman I know in the class including myself found his treatment of rape offensive and disturbing." Another woman felt "oppressed throughout the course." Although I always try to learn from my evaluations, I will not be bullied into abandoning a teaching style that I believe is best designed to stimulate thinking.... Are other less established teachers being coerced into changing their teaching by the fear of negative evaluations, which can be fatal at tenure? You bet they are, and it poses a real danger to academic freedom and good education. (Dershowitz 118-19)If you don't have the teflon coating of an Alan Dershowitz, don't run any risks. Avoid problems and get those scores up by teaching only the "good news" that students want and expect to be told. Remember, they are your customers, and the customer is always right.
Let's face it, thanks to student evaluations, teaching has become, as Robert Weissberg says, a "damage-control activity" (19). So, ignore the humiliation and simply accept the fact that to raise your evaluation scores, you are going to have to suck up to your students. I'm not talking about mere impression management, we've already covered that. I'm talking about balls-out sucking up!
Use these proven methods to raise your numbers.
Sure, some may scowl and call this "pander pollution" (the phrase is Crumbley's). But, as Peter Sacks reasoned, given the benefits and punishments professors face thanks to these evaluation forms, "pandering becomes quite rational and justifiable, however unfortunate its collective results" (86). And pandering is a whole lot more wholesome, and less riskier, than actually falsifying evaluation ratings, as several desperate professors have been caught doing (see U. Magazine December 1996: 7).
So, don't be embarrassed, join the vast army of professors who engage in pander pollution semester after semester for profit and praise. Become the Alpha Suckubus of your department.
(1) "If we truly want to discover which teachers make a positive and lasting difference, we will not poll pupils; we will examine them. We will not solicit their opinions; we will observe their behavior; to see which of them have been improved and which not" (Hocutt 58).
(2) As Damron pointed puts it, "This salutary effect would be lost if validation testing proved the instrument to be invalid" (Damron "Instructor" 7).
(3) Since the halo effect plays such a prominent role in evaluation research and in this essay, a word or two more about it would be appropriate. The concept is used to refer to the fact that if an individual is viewed as having some good qualities there is a bias towards assuming that the person in question has all good qualities. The flip side is that a person who is seen as being "bad" in one area is likely to be judged "bad" across a broad spectrum of behaviors. Some qualities of an instructor or student perceptions of an instructor have more power than others to create the halo effect. For example, being "charismatic" or "likeable" to students raises scores in almost all other evaluation categories, even those not associated with the instructor. Similarly, if an instructor is not charismatic, he or she is likely to be found wanting in other categories. Coren has argued that "if students are making negative comments on your course organization and your classroom presentation, it is likely that the operation of the halo effect will cause students to generalize their poor ratings to any questions with social and political content" (Coren "Are" 16). Simply put, "if the students do not like an instructor's teaching style, class organization or even the course textbook, when given the opportunity to do so, they are likely to label that instructor as racist, sexist and culturally biased" ("Are" 16).
Abrami, Philip, Wenda Dickens, Raymond Perry, and Les Leventhal. "Do Teacher Standards for Assigning Grades Affect Student Evaluations of Instruction?" Journal of Educational Psychology 72.1 (1980): 107-18.
Abrami, Philip. "Educational Sedu