The season of Thanksgiving is also the season of evaluations, and the Committee on Advancement and Tenure has asked me to reach out to the student body through the Quest to explain how the evaluation system works and communicate how you can best play your part within it.
The larger goal of the evaluation system is to ensure the health of our academic program. There are several significant elements to a successful academic program, including the shape of the curriculum, staffing levels, technical support and facilities, but one of the most important is the quality of the instruction offered in individual classes by the faculty. The evaluation system seeks to ensure that faculty members offer a consistently high-level of instruction in their classes, by providing a mechanism whereby students can easily provide helpful feedback.
It is, of course, important that all students take part, and important that everyone puts time and effort into their evaluations. One of the great things about Reed students is that they take most seriously their responsibility for the health of the educational program through their careful and thoughtful evaluations of how classes are taught.
All faculty members are regularly evaluated, whether they are up for reappointment or are continuing faculty members, including senior, tenured faculty members. A positive evaluation represents recognition of a hard job done well, and is also necessary for promotion up the ranks. For some faculty, their continued employment at the college is dependent on a positive (overall) evaluation.
Good teaching is a requirement for a successful evaluation, but there are two other considerations also: a faculty member’s scholarship and research and a faculty member’s service to the wider college community beyond the teaching of their classes (committee work, special events, etc.). Thesis advising and academic advising are considered part of a faculty member’s teaching responsibilities.
Student evaluations are not the only inputs: faculty write letters and the faculty member submits a Curriculum Vitae and self-evaluation. In the case of a tenure decision, letters are also sought from faculty from other institutions in the professor’s field of study.
(You may be asking yourself, “What is tenure?” Tenure is a commitment made by an academic institution to an individual faculty member to maintain their position at the institution except (roughly) in cases of significantly poor performance or personal misconduct. Tenure provides a faculty member with protection against being removed for ideas that are, for example, offensive or unpopular or unfashionable (as opposed to poorly researched or poorly communicated), while also providing, in the words of the American Association of University Professors, a “sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive” to strong candidates. Tenure is awarded after excellent performance during a significant probationary period, known as the tenure track.)
Back to evaluation. In the packets distributed at the end of the semester, there are three types of form. The white forms do not play a part in a faculty member’s evaluation; those are private communications between the student and the professor, distributed to the professor after grades have been submitted. The green bubble sheets are tallied anonymously, and the results go both to the faculty member and in the evaluation file (again, after grades have been submitted). The tan-colored, open-ended evaluation forms only go in the evaluation files, and cannot be left anonymous if they are to be considered by the Committee on Advancement and Tenure. Evaluation files are confidential and are very rarely seen by a particular faculty member. In the rare event that a faculty member requests to see their file, every effort will be made to protect students’ identities.
Finally, students are also welcome to write letters at any time and submit them to the Dean of Faculty’s office for inclusion in an evaluation file; this can be a particularly good way to provide an evaluation of teaching functions not tied to specific classes, such as research mentoring, thesis advising or academic advising. The open-ended tan evaluation forms can be picked up from the Registrar’s office at any time and used to submit such letters, if desired.
The green bubble sheets ask pointed and specific questions, but are a relatively blunt instrument, and cannot on their own provide a well-rounded picture. The open-ended tan evaluation sheets are critical in this respect. The more detail, the better; please avoid simple judgments such as “So and so rocks!” or “So and so was terrible,” and offer instead information that leads you to make that judgment: “X was a strength” or “Y was a weakness.” Specific and detailed examples are very helpful.
The most helpful evaluations are those that show the most thought about the goals and pedagogy of a given class, irrespective of the student’s personal performance, and that explore those goals or measure the professor’s performance against those goals. How well were the goals communicated? How well were they fulfilled through the syllabus, the homework, the assignments, the feedback, the discussions, the exams, etc.? What concrete things did professor X do that contributed to your understanding of the material? Please avoid evaluating the professor on things out of their control, such as classes that are not being offered or the college’s facilities or the professor’s personal appearance or style. Please also avoid judgments of taste. If you did not like the material in a class, distinguish what the professor brought to the material from the material itself. Did professor Y make it interesting? Or did they increase your understanding of it and similar materials? The point is to evaluate the quality of the teaching in a particular class.
If you need more time to do your evaluations, do take them away with you and turn them in to the registrar later yourself.
Finally, thank you, on behalf on the Commitment on Advancement and Tenure, for being part of this process. Student input is crucial to the evaluation process and to a high-quality academic program, and, thankfully, every year we receive much truly thoughtful and careful feedback.