🚀 go-pugleaf

Doug, I think that we all have SOME vindictive students.  If
we apply Pareto's Law, we can estimate that 20 percent of
the students are vindictive and that 80 percent are not.

In some cases,  an instructor might have an entire class
filled with vindictive students, just as occasionally we get
a class of extremely good students (fun) or an entire class
of the less-than-stellar (miserable).

I have had courses in which everyone earned A's.  I've also
classes in which the highest grade was a D/C.  I was really
concerned the semester I had the poor students and had the
advising office check the students' GPAs for me.  The
average GPA in that class was .8 (4.0=A), with the highest
GPA being 1.2.  How did I end up with that group?
Essentially it's the luck of the draw, and Standard Normal
Distribution usually ensures that a class always contains
some good students.

Most students try to be fair when they evaluate a professor,
especially when they believe that the professor has been
fair with them.  If an instructor had several vindictive
people in one class, however, his or her evaluations could
be adversely affected that semester.

Another problem is the students' actual ability to answer
questions typically asked on the evaluation forms.  Students
who never take advantage of office hours are still required
to comment on whether the instructor keeps posted office
hours.  Freshmen in their first semester are asked to
compare an instructor to all other instructors they have had
at the institution, and so on.

Of course another problem that we haven't yet discussed is
the selective perception of the instructors who are looking
back over their years of accumulated evaluations and
focusing on the most negative.  My first year teaching at an
institution that used evaluations, my department chair went
through the 80 or so evaluations I received, pulled out the
half a dozen or so that contained negative comments,
underlined those comments in red, and returned the
evaluations to me with a cover letter saying that I needed
to "fix" those things if I expected to earn tenure.

To paraphrase Lincoln, "You can please all the people some
of the time; you can please some of the people all the time;
but you can't please all the people all the time."
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Joel P. Bowman                        bowman@gw.wmich.edu
Haworth College of Business           CompuServe:  73206,2537
Western Michigan University           Voice:  616/387-5403
Kalamazoo, MI 49008-3821              FAX:    616/387-5710
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