Weaponizing Student Evaluations (Part II)

You won’t believe what people write on evaluations for female professors.

His evaluation isn’t going to be very nice.

Today, we talk about the anonymous teaching evaluation.  You know, the evaluation you are supposed to get that appraises your teaching, course materials, student accessibility, and all things pedagogy.

Just kidding.  This is about why anonymous evaluations shouldn’t be anonymous.  At least, this is a small sample of the compelling evidence for why administrators should be able to access information to determine whether or not students are engaging in this stuff in evaluations, and to deal with those situations as they arise.

Think I’m kidding?  Let’s break these pearls of wisdom down into categories of helpfulness.

My Dinner with Andre, Student Version:

“I don’t like her as a professor but she’d be great to grab dinner with.”

“Definitely would want to hang out with her, or do yoga….”

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I Know! We Can Go Shopping Together!:

“She’s a bitch but she wears great shoes.”

“You have the best clothes of any professor at the law school!  Where do you shop?”

“I love your outfits!”

“Your clothes are amazing!”

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“Loved her style!”

Her Emotional Support Is Just What Was Needed.  Or Not:

“..literally one of the sweetest professors….”

“Great teacher, too nerdy for me”

“Sweet and helpful”

“Catty and Unapproachable.”

“She frequently comes across as a bully.”

“Very nice and caring.”

She Doesn’t Sound or Look Quite Right:

“Her California accent is annoying and makes her sound dumb.”

“Better eye contact.”

“More receptive to questions.”

And yes, people sent me a few “smile more” evaluations.

Pregnancy Really Changed Her Pedagogy:[1]

“She was a good professor until her pregnancy got in the way.”

“Even pregnancy could not stop her from being effective and available to us students throughout the term.”

She’s To Blame for Something for Which I’m Angry:

“How did this moron get here?”

Bitch gave me bad grades for no reason.”

The Object of the Gaze:

“Boring but hot.”

“Probably shouldn’t say this but pretty freakin’ hot.  Maybe it’s cause I’m drunk.  J/K”

“No clue what she’s talking about.  Nice tits tho.”

“Excitable and sexy….”

“I would love to take a yoga class from Prof. Great enthusiasm. . . Speaking for all the boys in the back: we loved her pearls, heels, spunky persona, skirts, occasional glimpness [sic] of pastel colored undergarments, her smile, and sparkly eyes. She is a babe. The show makes the class worth it. Great lecturer!”

“Prof is distractingly attractive and her penchant for tight shirts, form fitting skirts and knee high boots did not help matters. Often she would begin class wearing a suit jacket and then casually remove it midway through class, revealing a sleeveless shirt like the kind girls wear when they go clubbing. How are we supposed to learn when the professor performs a convincing striptease halfway through every class? LOL. In all seriousness she is very smart and organized and I did learn a lot about [the course] but that is not the main reason of [sic] take the class.”

“She’d make a good wife if she learned how to cook….”

Not angry enough?  One student evaluation referred to “Miss” and not “Professor.”

The literature has repeatedly demonstrated the bias of student evaluations against female professors, regardless of the subject they teach.  Anonymous teaching evaluations allow the transfer of that bias into something that purports to be objective, but isn’t by any stretch of the imagination.

The upshot of these comments is that higher education REALLY needs to stop using anonymous evaluations.  They should at least not be anonymous to administrators, even if they are anonymous to professors.  Otherwise, what do you think you’re subjecting female professors to when they are forced to look at their student evaluations, and your school uses them for hiring, firing, and tenure decisions?

HINT: It’s not “customer service” and it’s not improvement of pedagogy.

I want to thank each and every one of you who sent me your evaluation comments or shared them with me on Twitter.

UPDATE ON LAST WEEK’S POST:  Speaking of evaluations, after Dean Paul Caron, an awesome guy, tax guru, and friend of LawProfBlawg, posted on his blog about my blog post last week about student evaluations, some comments came.  They were anonymous comments of the type you might expect to receive, say, on a student evaluation!  So without further ado, let me introduce you to people who might very well be on hiring or tenure committees:

“Could it be, that on the college/university level, men are better teachers? Or that too many of the women are there because of Affirmative Action, and aren’t of the same quality as the men who had to overcome Affirmative Action to get there?” – signed Milwaukee.

“If you want to prove it, have a professor give the same lecture to different classes, and paint the professor’s skin color differently: white, brown, yellow, black, purple, whatever. Then show me that the darker the complexion, the lower the reviews. Then you’ll convince me. Until then, you’re just not that good a professor. Maybe your children will be better professors, and student evaluations will reflect that.”—signed Anon.

Anon, my prediction is purple would win overall because everyone loves Prince and Alice Walker (“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it”).

“The only black female professor I has [sic] was in law school. She was a decent teacher when she wasn’t talking down to us or preaching anti-male rhetoric.” – signed Chris.

Sigh.

[1] Phyllis Baker & Martha Copp, Gender performance matters most: The interaction of gendered expectations, feminist course content and pregnancy in students’ course evaluations. Teaching Sociology 25(1) (1997), 29-43.


LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here He is way funnier on social media, he claims.  Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.