It is once again time for end-of-semester evaluations. Time for students to let their professors know what they liked and what they didn’t. And it’s the time when some of us get nervous and hope we’ve done a good job, all the while second-guessing a lot of the decisions we made this semester about what to teach and how to teach it.

Most of us in the economics department at SCSU have moved towards doing our evaluations electronically on D2L. For most questions, students give a 1-5 rating and then have the option to provide comments about that specific topic. I have found that the quality of the open-ended responses is so much better using electronic evaluations than it ever was with paper evaluations. Students can take the evaluation whenever they have five minutes at a computer, instead of right before or after a final exam when they really don’t want to spend the time. Most students can type faster than they can write, so instead of a half-sentence, they write several complete sentences. Students have provided much better information about the little things (exams, textbook, other things) than they used to. And when asked about the electronic evaluation process vs. paper evaluations, over 95% of students said they preferred the electronic evaluation, it took less time, and they were able to provide better feedback.

I write this post for students, to encourage them to take the evaluation process seriously. Most of your professors really do want to give you the best education possible. We’re supposed to try new things: new books, new websites, new ways of delivering content. Sometimes they work out well and sometimes they don’t. Some experiments fail, and we learn from that — so we need you to be honest and constructive about what works and what doesn’t. We need your feedback so that we give you a course that fits our requirements, but does it in a way that works well for students too. I recommend you visit the following site in preparation for your evaluations these last few weeks of the semester. Take the process seriously — other students will benefit from the feedback you provide, and your professor will appreciate the time you took in giving constructive feedback that helps them craft a better course. I know I’ve done several new things in courses as a result of comments and suggestions I received the semester before, and most of them worked out very well.

Last semester, after all my evaluations were in, I e-mailed a summary of them to my students so they could look at them. I specifically wanted them to see the comments. I wanted them to see how hard our job as professors can be when we have a class of 70 students. They needed to see that for every student that says “I like the fact that you write on the chalkboard” there’s a student that says “The chalkboard sucks — you should use PowerPoint.” For every student that says “The exams sucked — you should use multiple choice” there’s a student that says “I’m so glad you don’t use multiple choice.” We cannot make all of our students happy. You need to know that. If you have a professor that does something in a way you find annoying or not constructive, please understand that many other students feel the exact opposite. And if you love how a professor does something in particular, there’s probably another student that hates the same professor for that very same reason. That’s why you need to take the syllabus seriously — if your professor does something in class you don’t like (group projects, grading attendance, etc.), then don’t take that class. E-mail your professors ahead of time and ask for a syllabus so you don’t waste the first week of class. Most of us will appreciate the fact that you’re taking your education so seriously.

There are a variety of websites for students to examine when considering taking a potential class or professor. There are two pretty good websites you can go to if you want to learn more about your professors or provide feedback to other students who might benefit from your insight:RateMyProfessors and CampusBuddy.

Most people know about RMP, so I won’t go into too much detail here (but I will come back to it later in this post). CampusBuddy is relatively new. You can log in through your facebook account, so that makes it easy. The interesting thing about CampusBuddy is that while you can rate your professors (although there are very few ratings on the site), the most important feature of the site is that you can get information about grades. CampusBuddy uses actual data from the registration office, so you can see what grades have been given by department, by course, and by professor. When you have a variety of people to take a required course from, this kind of information can be useful. The only majors with GPAs lower than economics are physics, math, and engineering (if memory serves me correctly).

Here’s where things get personal. If you look at all the professors in the economics department here at SCSU, you’ll find I give out the third-highest GPA (it’s listed as fourth, but one of the people above me, Hari Luitel, has moved on to warmer temperatures). There’s a stigma involved in that, as some professors might think you’re just handing out A’s like candy. Recall the scene from an episode of Friends where Ross posts his grades. Another professor looks at them and says, “Looks like someone was generous this semester,” after which Ross starts putting minuses on all the grades.

I honestly don’t know what to make of my GPA. On one hand, perhaps my courses are really easy and it’s easy to get a good grade in my classes. Or perhaps I’m a good professor and my students learn so well from me that they just learn the material well enough to get good grades. I’d like to think it’s the latter, but how can one be sure? As my tenure clock ticks away, it makes me wonder how others at the school will determine whether I am a good professor.

One way is to look at the RMP data. RMP has three ratings: helpfulness, clarity and ease. Each is given a 1-5 score. The overall quality rating is the combined average of helpfulness and clarity (assuming that more = better here). The ease rating is kept separate. I think an easiness rating too close to 1 or too close to 5 is equally bad. There’s also a correllation between the two measures. I might actually download the data on every SCSU professor just to examine this further, but it’s low on my list of priorities. It seems that professors that get low easiness scores tend to not get good quality scores, and professors that get high quality scores also get high easiness scores. So how exactly should one combine this information to make sense of this? One way I propose is to take the quality rating and subtract the easiness rating. That way, if someone scores really well on quality just because their class is a cakewalk, they’ll get an ease-adjusted quality rating (EAQR) of 5-5=0. I did that for everyone in my department here, and for everyone in my former department at NMU. The average EAQR for the both economics departments is 0.5, with a standard deviation of about 0.6. My EAQR is 1.7 at SCSU and 1.4 at NMU — so either I’ve gotten better or my classes have become harder since I switched schools. I think my EAQR says that I’m an effective professor who is both helpful and clear, but who doesn’t just water down material to make a class so easy that everybody gets a good grade. Those EAQR ratings put me right in line with my former colleague Dave Prychitko, and his is good company to be in.

Another way is to look at end-of-semester evaluations. Obviously your professors care about the overall quality rating, but studies have shown that non-educational things can influence those ratings. So I look at a few additional questions that ask students to compare this class to similar classes (i.e. 200-level classes with other 200-level classes). The first one I look at is “How much do you think you have learned in this course, as compared to similar courses?” Possible responses are: much less than usual, less than usual, about usual, more than usual, much more than usual. The second question is ”The work load for this course, as compared to similar courses, is:” Possible responses are: much too light, a little too light, about right, a little too heavy, much too heavy.

If students learn a lot because the work is demanding, some professors would say that’s just fine, and I definitely understand that argument. But if students feel they have learned a lot and not had to work excessively hard to do so, I would argue that is a better outcome. On the first question, I usually get above 80% answering either “much more than usual” or “more than usual,” and only one or two percent giving me anything less than “about usual.” On the second question, I usually get about 80% answering “about right” and most of the rest being “a little too heavy.” Most students of mine seem to feel that the workload was about average but the knowledge gained was above average. So on that score, I feel I’m doing a good job. Ultimately, the highest compliment a student can pay me is to say they learned a lot, and it seems like the data bear that out.

I don’t think most of my former students will tell you that my classes are a cakewalk (maybe the Economics of Film class, but that was a given). And I would feel comfortable with any of my A students in principles taking the principles exams of any other economics professor anywhere. So yeah, I give out more A’s and B’s than a lot of my colleagues, but I think my students learn in my courses and I think they have earned those grades.

I’m interested in hearing what students think about the easiness of a course vs. what you learn in it, and what you think makes a professor good.