Warnings!!!!

Before you look at the data below, you should know something important about course evaluations: they’re not perfect (surprise!!).

The first issue to be aware of is that regardless of the question being asked (“Did the instructor use class time effectively?” vs. “Was the instructor available for office hours?”), students give high scores if they liked the professor and low scores if they didn’t like the professor. In other words, course evaluations are largely–but not exclusively–a measure of “likability”.

A second important issue (which is related to the first important issue) is that course evaluations are biased in many ways. Course evaluations are generally biased in favor of white faculty and male faculty. They also tend to be biased based on grades–if students get an “A”, they are more likely to give good course evaluations. Therefore, one professor’s evaluations can’t really be compared to another professor’s evaluations without additional context.

Now what?!!

Where does that leave us? I’m a scientist, I like data, and I want to do as good of a job as I can teaching, so how can I use course evaluations? I can’t really compare myself to individual faculty, but I can compare myself to myself. Every term, I compare my course evaluations to past evaluation to see if the things that I changed in the course improved the course from the students’ perspective.

For example, when I first taught BI 315 in the Winter 2012 term, my overall course evaluation average score was 3.7 +/- 0.1 (mean +/- s.e.m.). For context, the overall average for the Biology Department was 4.2 +/- 0.1). I was not pleased with those results. I made changes to BI 315 over the years, and in the Winter 2019 term, my course evaluation average reached 4.4 +/- 0.1 (yea!!). Then…the COVID pandemic. The transition to online/hybrid was okay, but not great–my average for BI 315 was 4.1 +/1 0.1 in Winter 2022. In Winter 2024, I tried to dramatically revise the course: in-class time was exclusively dedicated to reading and interpreting primary literature, and students had to watch all the lectures outside of class. It did not go well (3.6 +/- 0.2). Needless to say, I’ll be making changes…

What’s the take home message? Course evaluations are useful and informative. If you ever hear anyone say that course evaluations are not useful or informative, let them know that I am happy to help them figure out how to use them!!

How am I doing?

Without further ado, below is a figure showing my course evaluation averages since 2018 (the image is blurry because I’m a WordPress novice, but if you click on the image you’ll see a nice figure). The Biology Department 6-year average is represented with a black line. This isn’t the best way to do statistics, so I wouldn’t publish this…but I was above the departmental average 33 times (rounding to 1 digit), below 20 times and tied 7 times. That makes my “Winning Percentage” 0.610, or about the same as the 2023-24 NY Knicks, which was good for 2nd place in the Eastern Conference!