What My Students Say About Me When I'm Not Looking

When the email comes in from the Rutgers Center for Teaching Advancement and Research Assessment, it's all I can do to stay put long enough to wrap up my conversation. I beeline to my car, curse at the wifi, and race back to my office, almost toppling a very elderly and esteemed sociologist. Sorry, professor. My officemates are both there (really? three in one office? yes.), so I act nonchalant as I open my laptop. 

But I'm anything but nonchalant. It's time for student surveys. 

At Rutgers, where I'm a doctoral fellow in Education and an adjunct instructor in the Sociology department, students are invited at the end of each semester to complete surveys about their classes. The surveys ask them about the course, but they're really asking about the instructor: was she positive, was she prepared, did she return grades on time? What were the best things about the course? What were the worst? Would you recommend this course to another student? 

My department gives awards for the top-rated instructors and professors each term. I don't aspire to win them, but I'm worried that if there are rewards, there are also penalties. Lots and lots of penalties. I still have nightmares about being called to my elementary school principal's office. Student surveys? 

No two words strike greater fear into my heart. 

We all know we're living in the age of data-driven instruction. I remember from my time in k-12 education the terrible heart-in-throat walk to the auditorium each spring for the big reveal of state test results. We'd get an emailed agenda for the faculty meeting sometime around noon, and instead of the usual items -- grade level alignment meetings, drug and alcohol awareness trainings, exhortations to clean the staff fridge and donate to the sunshine fund -- there would be just one: state test results. 

I taught language arts to 11th and 12th graders in Newark, NJ, so the stats our administration plunked into a bare bones PowerPoint presentation for review felt like a personal assessment of my teaching. Each statistic was one of my kids, and the corridor leading to the auditorium was a million miles long.

When I started teaching Sociology as an adjunct at Rutgers, it felt great to think that I would no longer be living under the specter of high-stakes testing. I still feel lucky that I can design my own syllabi and develop my own assignments and assessments without balancing my beliefs about student needs against the demands of an essentializing, misguided bureaucracy. 

But that doesn't mean data doesn't matter anymore. Far from it. In the business of higher education, student surveys are the Yelp reviews, and I'm the tiny restaurant that opened on loans and a prayer.  

So here I am, trying to make sense of another batch of student surveys. This set is for a course I taught that's cross-listed between Women's & Gender Studies and Sociology, and it was held in a compressed timeframe -- we call it a Winter Intensive. Here are some thoughts: 

• First, I ignore everything and calculate my average score on all items pertaining to me. 4.87/5, the best I've ever gotten (the term I got a 4.31, I announced tremulously that I was sure I'd be able to get a job as an admissions counselor if teaching didn't work out). What a relief! 
• Some of the student comments are adorable, like the one that says, "I was totally uninterested by this course and enrolled just to finish my final minor degree requirement. The instructor made me not only comfortable with material that would be considered taboo, but made me open up my mind to views and opinions I hadn't even ever previously considered. I will leave this class with a wider scope of knowledge regarding gender and sexuality as it exists in 'the fringes' of society, knowledge which I will take with me into 'the real world.'" Or the much more succinct, "I want another minor in gender studies. If I stay on an extra semester, please give Mara a commission." (As if! Oh, darling, that is not how the business of higher education works.)
• Others are horrifying, like the one that says, in answer to a question about what led the student to join the class, "Because Rutgers screws us in so many ways. Needed the credits, the class, basically the university gave me no choice," or the ones that say "too much work, too much work, she gave too much work." Out of 10 students responding, two say they spent one hour on classwork per day, six say they spent two, and two said they spent three.
• I got 5's from 100% of students on questions about my positive attitude and the effectiveness of my responses to student concerns. 
• My lowest score was for "assigns grades fairly" -- a 4.33 -- but it seems like this is the department and level mean, so I don't feel so bad. In the other six out of seven items directly related to evaluation of my teaching, I beat the department mean. 
• Three students volunteered, unprompted, in response to an open question about what they liked about the course, that they liked our blogs! I'm so pleased. 
• In the end, only 10 out of 18 students responded to the survey, even though I exhorted them to complete it again and again, in class and via our course website.

Overall, I'm really happy with the survey results this time around, and I have some good takeaways. Two students gave a really good suggestion: that I grade student blogs at intervals during the semester, rather than just once at the end. I had been giving formative assessment of the blogs along the way, in the form of primate messages to students and comments on blogs, but students tend to be deeply anxious about grades, and I understand why. This semester, I'm grading all student blogs four times. We'll see how that works. 

I'm also going to work on getting 100% participation on the surveys. Student surveys may always scare me, but they do an essential good for my students, my department, and me. If my performance is going to be evaluated based on data, I'd rather have all the data I can possibly collect.