Student course evaluations-those pesky white and yellow sheets you fill out at the end of the semester-are seen only by professors. Soon, however, that system may change.
“Professor evaluations are only seen by faculty – period,” said Academic Vice President Dr. Orin Grossman. “It’s a very bad situation, one that I think will change this year.”
According to Grossman, evaluations may be used in determining pay raises for faculty members in accordance with a new pay system instituted last year.
“With merit pay especially, portions of a faculty member’s salary will be determined by class performance, and professor evaluations written by the students will be a factor in the merit pay,” said Grossman.
Merit pay is a form of compensation that-in theory-rewards the best and brightest faculty members for various forms of achievement, such as publication in scholarly journals or speaking at academic conferences.
Professors interviewed by The Mirror were skeptical about the validity of such an assessment.
“There are better ways to evaluate a professor’s performance, but they involve directly watching what individual faculty are doing,” said Professor George Lang of the mathematics department.
As a supplement to the professor evaluations FUSA is attempting to organize a professional and comprehensive online-based forum in which students can share their opinion of different classes and professors.
The FUSA online evaluations would be based on the Web site yourteachers.com. Students would enter their StagWeb email address and would be logged into the Web site and post about their professors.
“What FUSA is doing would not replace any system that the university currently holds in place,” said Geoffrey Cook ’05, vice president of Senate.
Cook said the online evaluations would serve two purposes: first, to prevent students and non-students from receiving misleading and unprofessional information, and second, to help students register for classes.
“We pitched the idea to Dr. Grossman, and he will present the idea to the faculty, and we’ll wait on the faculty reaction,” said Kevin Neubauer ’05, FUSA president. “If you look at Web sites like ratemyprofessor.com, there are a lot of comments from Fairfield students, even more than a bigger school such as Villanova.”
In years past, FUSA had a more immediate role in professor evaluations.
“Previously, there were two parts for the professor evaluations, one for the professor and one for FUSA,” said Dr. Kurt Schlichting, a professor of sociology. “FUSA would tabulate the results of the evaluations and make them available to the public. Why they don’t do that anymore, I don’t know.”
FUSA officials said keeping such a system was a time-consuming process.
“It was difficult [to tabulate the evaluations],” said Cook. “I don’t know why it was not done for the past few years, but the goal is for online evaluations [such as through yourteachers.com] to replace it.
“It would probably be cheaper and more accessible to do the evaluations online,” Cook said.
Web sites like ratemyprofessor.com already offer students and members of the Fairfield administration an opportunity to share opinions on the performance of professors in an open forum, albeit in a less restricted manner.
“Being curious, I have looked at professor’s evaluations [on ratemyprofessor.com], and it is suggestive and interesting,” said Grossman, “However, I would never use it as an official way to determine salary increments.”
Professor reaction to evaluations being made public, both to Fairfield administration and students, is mixed.
“I’m all for accountability,” said Schlichting. “I think we should all be held accountable. But, there is the danger of it becoming a popularity contest.”
Some professors have even questioned the validity of the evaluations in general.
“Some studies show that better looking teachers get better evaluations, and more exuberant teaching, even with the same content and no increase in student performance on exams, gets higher evaluations,” said Lang. “Male teachers rate higher, women rate female teachers higher, and evaluations are influenced by the student’s expectations of grades.
“So, what the evaluations measure is student satisfaction, but not teaching effectiveness,” said Lang. “Don’t misunderstand me, I want students to enjoy my courses, but it’s not my first goal – conveying the material is.”
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