objectives, or even inflated grades. All administrators care about are high ratings and satisfied students. Give them both and make them happy!
FLATTER THE POLITICAL BIASES OF STUDENTS!
Stroke the political biases of your students, especially if the evaluation form solicits information about the cultural, racial or gender biases of the instructor or course ("classroom climate" questions). Stanley Coren ("When") contends that when instructors present arguments and evidence on both sides of a controversial issue, such as cognitive differences between the sexes, they seriously endanger their evaluation scores. That's because students, like most people, are vulnerable to the "fundamental attribution error effect," which confuses "is" with "ought." Students think that when an instructor objectively reports the controversial conclusions of scientific research, he or she endorses or likes the findings. Coren discovered that a quarter of the students were apt to interpret the presentation of evidence about the genetic and racial differences in intelligence as motivated by racism, rendering the professor a racist for twenty-five percent of students (14). When the subject of discussion was the cognitive skills of men and women, twenty-six percent deemed the instructor "sexist" and motivated by a desire to put down women, with ninety-four percent of female students thinking this.
Even in law school it is becoming increasingly dangerous to teach controversial material in an even-handed way. Alan Dershowitz writes that a sizable group of law students were offended by his dispassionate examination of the legal issue of rape, and "used the power of their evaluations in an attempt to exact their political revenge for my politically incorrect teaching":
One student said that I do "not deserve to teach at Harvard" because of my "convoluted rape examples." Another argued that women be allowed an "option" not to take my class because I "spent two days talking about false reports of rape," another demanded that my "teaching privileges" 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 wh