Monday, May 08, 2006

Student evaluations

Uncertain Principles has some good advice about student evaluations. At my school, I find the students remarkably bad at evaluating a class. And of course it's always funny (and very sad) pointing out the horrible grammar. One semester I taught a new class and one I had taught many times. The evaluations came back with high scores for "knowledge of the material" in the new class and low scores in the other. The answer to such a paradox was simply that low-scored class was calculus based physics which was very hard.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I get the biggest kick out of pairing up diametrically opposing comments. "Not enough examples", I'd like you to meet "Spent too much time on one topic" ZAP! "Material was taken straight from the textbook", check out "Lecture notes should be provided as a resource" POW! "Professor should put material in larger context more often" have a look at "Digressions about material not on the syllabus were confusing" KaBOOM!