Student Evaluations
The Chronicle of Higher Education routinely publishes articles on end-of-semester student evaluations. They are criticized as hated, subjective, inherently unreliable, vulnerable to gender bias, and a cause of grade inflation. I share many of these criticisms. The lack of standardization of questions, wide variability in course delivery across the campus, and ignorance of best practices for public surveys combine to produce a real mess in determining whether one is a good educator. Few universities have adopted meaningful alternatives, choosing instead to use student evaluations as one of few teaching-related criteria for contract renewal, promotion, and/or tenure (if the quality of one’s teaching is a factor at all). Yet while students are called upon to provide this service they are often unable to review these ratings for their own purposes. Instead they must rely on even less reliable measures like word of mouth from a few peers or dubious websites like RateMyProfessors.
As a lecturer I could not change institutional policies on student evaluations. However, I could offer students (and colleagues) some transparency by sharing the results. If student labor is used to produce these ratings I believe they should have access to them. Comparisons of my performance across semesters can be difficult due to the highly variable number of participants each semester and changes in course content, as well as the fact that during my time at UWI its administrators changed the course evaluation template. That said, responses to the prompt “The lecturer’s performance was…”, which are measured on a 5.0 scale, are as follows:
2019
LITS 2108: Modern American Literary Prose
Average 4.5 – Median 5.0
LITS 2109: Genre Studies-Crime Fiction
Average 4.3 – Median 4.0
2018
LITS 2108: Modern American Literary Prose
Average 4.81 – Median 5.0
LITS 2110: African Prose Fiction
Average 4.60 – Median 5.0
LITS 2208: African Drama, Poetry, and Orature
Average 5.00 – Median 5.0
LITS 6105: The Cultural Production of Black Internationalism
Average 5.00 – Median 5.0
2017
LITS 2108: Modern American Literary Prose
Average 4.27 – Median 4.0
LITS 2109: Genre Studies-Crime Fiction
Average 4.75 – Median 5.0
LITS 2110: African Prose Fiction
Average 4.71 – Median 5.0
LITS 2208: African Drama, Poetry, and Orature
Average 4.80 – Median 5.0
2016
LITS 2101: Origins of the Novel
Average 4.75 – Median 5.0
LITS 2110: African Prose Fiction
Average 4.80 – Median 5.0