I’ve talked about student evaluations before on this blog. I take them very personally, probably too much for my own good. If someone doesn’t like the class, I want to know why — but usually it’s just a vague response that doesn’t tell me how I could improve. I could have 99 people say they loved the class and 1 person say they hated it and I’m going to focus on the 1 person who hated it and wonder what I could have done differently to reach that person. (I actually had one student this semester say that while they didn’t really like me as a person, they thought I was a great teacher — I’m glad that student could separate the two.) I hope that desire to reach everyone makes me a better teacher, trying to appeal to as many people as I can, but the fact is we can’t appeal to everyone. For every person who says “you should use Powerpoint” there are two people who say they love the fact that I don’t use Powerpoint. It’s the classic public goods problem: there is only one level of the public good and people have different preferences, so many people will be unhappy with what is provided. Some want more, some want less, and many people are not happy — the Senate Health Care Bill is a great example. Republicans think it goes too far towards government control, some Democrats don’t think it goes far enough, and the crucial 60 votes hangs by the narrowest of margins.

I bring this up because I just got a new rating on my Ratemyprofessors.com page. It’s for my Econ 201 class and it’s not good:

I can see why some people might like him but if you get on his bad side your done for in the class. And like others said he is pretty full of himself.

(As Ross from Friends would say: “Y-O-U-’-R-E means “you are.” Y-O-U-R means “your.”)

I’m not going to argue the personality criticism because there’s no point. If you don’t like the way I come across, I can’t help that. If you take my statement of facts and theory with assertion as arrogance, that’s your problem. The person I make fun of the most in my classes is myself, yet somehow I’m arrogant.

But what really irks me is the claim that I would give people anything other than the grade they deserve. (Quick question: does using the word “irks” make me arrogant?) That is an attack on my integrity as a professor and I thought I had to say something somewhere to defend myself. (Good thing I have this blog!) This student got a bad grade and assumes that it’s because I don’t like him/her. To be honest, I can’t think of one student in that class who was on my “bad side.” I have no idea who could have written this because I actually really enjoyed that class — the students in it asked great questions and we had good interactions. To be honest, the only students that I don’t like in any class are the ones who don’t come to class, don’t do assignments, and show me through their lack of effort that they don’t really care about the class. But even then, they don’t get on my bad side — they get on my indifferent side.

All of my grading in that class is blind. I grade all the in-class exercises without looking at names. All the exams are graded blind: I flip over the cover page and grade all the question #1’s, then I move on and grade all the #2’s, etc. I have no idea who anybody is until after I’m done and I’m adding up the scores on the individual questions. All the online work is up to the students — I have no control over that. If anyone gets a bad grade in that class, it is because they did not do the work or did not learn the material, plain and simple. Blaming it on getting on my bad side is a weak excuse.

Part of me wishes I didn’t care so much. My colleagues with more experience tell me that you can’t worry about students like this — you can’t please everyone anyway so you should just shrug off the criticism. I guess I’m not cynical enough to think that way yet. (Maybe once I get tenure — just kidding!) I hope there’s a way to become less sensitive to the criticism while still retaining the desire to do my best to reach every student, but I’m not sure there is.

Okay, it’s been a long semester and I have two weeks to get a bunch of online videos done to prepare for the next semester. Enjoy the rest of your break if you have one.