🚀 go-pugleaf

Jennifer MacLennan's observations about students taking delight in
savaging teachers with student class evaluations are disturbing.
(I am Victor Harnack, and I am the one, Jennifer, who sent the
report on the use of graduating seniors to furnish "top third exit
polls".)  Granted, our system seeks to find reward evaluations which
can be used for positive evaluations in P&T plus salary recommendations.
Nonetheless, I simply have not encountered here at the U. of Illinois
at Chicago anything like the extent of what Jennifer reported.

Of course every prof has a few detractors and a few profs have a
deservedly large group of detractors.  Then there are a few teachers
who are well-intentioned but utterly without interpersonal skills.
Their detractors are sometimes unnecessarily brutal.

Our problems with the course evaluations were usually that the
students were so generous with their assessments that we could
make no useful discriminations.

The only place I encountered the kind of spleen that you describe
was when I taught for a semester on the Semester-at-Sea program.
The students there tended to use the whole spectrum of evaluation.
Some teachers were rated A+ and some F-.  I thought that the
students were particularly rough on those teachers (about 1/4 of
the total) whom they did not like.

The only other comparable experience might be the Stanley Milgram
experiments.

In general I am having difficulty trying to account for the
viciousness of the kind you described.  Do you have any more
explanations?