« Forum Shopping in Patent Cases | Main | Lord Acton tries the Samba; or, the Paradox of Brazil's Decentralized Government »
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Do you like my shoes?
Last year, Dean Scales of Rutgers-Camden law school specifically asked students not to comment on their professors' attire when filling out their course evaluations. Yesterday, a friend of mine reposted this article and, given the fact that I have just recently received this semester's evaluations, it made me start thinking about the issue of faculty evaluations again.
Students occasionally comment on my clothes but, until Dean Scales's request last year, I never really thought much about these types of comments. I think there are a number of different reasons for this. First, I often compliment people on their clothing. Consequently, it didn't really strike me as odd that a student staring at me for hours every week might notice my clothing and, if they liked it, compliment it. Second and relatedly, I believe I didn't really give these comments much thought because they have always been nice. I love to hear that students like my class and it was also nice to hear they liked my shoes or my dress. However, I am pretty sure I would have felt very differently if these clothing comments were criticisms of my appearance. Negative comments about a professor's appearance, particularly when such comments appear to be primarily directed at female faculty, are problematic.
Therefore, one issue this controversy raises is whether appearance compliments can be ok if appearance criticisms are not. I am not sure. At the same time, there is also a broader question raised by this issue. Specifically, given the prevalence of non-teaching related comments in course evaluations, is there a problem with the current method of evaluating professors and should it be changed?.
Theoretically, course evaluations, particularly the non-numerical portion, are a way for students to tell their professors what they liked and didn't like about the class. Ideally, professors will then use these comments to improve the course in the future. The problem however, is that student comments rarely serve this function.
Most of the complimentary comments I have seen, both for myself and my colleagues are short and unilluminating. They are phrases like "great class," or "awesome prof" or, in one memorable instance, "luminous." It is lovely to receive such comments, but they are not extremely helpful. Most students do not elaborate on the specific aspects of the course they liked and what teaching methods they found particularly useful. Negative comments are sometimes longer, but they are often perfunctory as well. Common ones include "boring," or "didn't like the textbook." Most concerning however, is the fact that comments provide a place for students to be mean. I once had a student criticize the way I held a paperclip and I have heard about many much crueler comments received by friends and colleagues throughout the academy.
As professors, it is our job to teach our students as effectively as we can and to be responsive to their needs and concerns. Course evaluations are intended to help us do that. However, if they are not serving this purpose but are instead primarily providing a venue for ad hominem attacks then, as is increasingly done in the blogging world, perhaps it's time to turn off the comments.
Posted by Marcia Zug on May 19, 2016 at 12:11 PM | Permalink
Comments
"Compliments are as inappropriate as negative comments because they reflect the writer's belief that appearance is part of the criteria for assessing a faculty member's performance.”
I disagree with both the descriptive and normative assertions here. First, descriptively, this doesn’t follow. Students often make remarks on evals that relate to matters they realize have nothing to do with teaching performance. A student can quite reasonably think “this doesn’t relate to the teacher’s perforamance, but I bet s/he’d like to know that I thought s/he was an awesome dresser."
As for propriety, depending on the comment, I don’t see this as a problem. I think it's unfair to expect students to view the world through the same idiosyncratically calibrated academic lenses through which technically irrelevant compliments are deemed to be sexist/degrading/offensive/anti-semetic/post-colonialist/hyper-allergenic or (why not?!) all of the above.
Posted by: SPOC | May 20, 2016 1:17:30 PM
I find AnonProf2's comments to be incredibly condescending. As a law student, we never like "easy" teachers, or teachers who are not rigorous, for 3 main reasons:
1) Easy teachers add no value. If the teacher is all fluff and just goes generally over the casebook, many students find their time in the classroom to be a complete waste of time. We hate wasting our time. If the teacher adds no value, we do not want to be in the classroom, and would rather read an E&E. The teachers we love are the teachers that do add value, which brings me to my second point.
2) We love rigorous, challenging teachers who force us to see the law in new ways. My section's favorite teacher asked us incredibly hard questions, and we were scared of his questions, and happy when it was over, but we loved him for it. He taught us new, fascinating, eye-opening ways to think critically about the law; he added value to our education; his teaching was part of the reason our money was well spent.
3) I can understand the argument for easy or pandering classes better in a non-curved class. People like easy As. But in a curved class, the desire for an easy class is nonsensical. No-one I have ever met desires an easy class in a curved class. By definition you cannot all receive As, so the desire for an easy A completely disappears. In my curved classes that were easy, people hated it. They didn't know how to prepare because they generally understood the material, didn't know what they needed to study to receive a good grade, and were filled with uncertainty and apprehension. And easy classes tend to result in easy finals, and NO-ONE likes an easy final in a curved class. Everyone feels like they did great and, by definition, only a small percentage of the class actually does well. You could be getting a C or an A - you have no idea. And the difference between a C and A could be minute or trivial, which is not fair.
I think student evals are incredibly important, and for professors who think only the "easy" professors receive great evals, I suggest thinking about how well you teach the material. Pedagogical theory is, ultimately, how best to teach, and if you think the students should not be arbiters of that, then maybe you need more pedagogical theory.
Posted by: LawStudent | May 20, 2016 12:17:10 PM
When I was a law student, I would have liked to see professor evaluations digitized and distributed with the syllabus rather than handed out with a pencil on the last day of class. As someone who has studied pedagogy, I would like to give professors who seem like they want it some meaningful feedback on their teaching. But asking me to encapsulate a semester's worth of course work into whatever short paragraph I can scrawl out in the 4 minutes the class takes to do evaluations while simultaneously worrying about the looming final exam usually resulted in me giving minimal comments. Having a running document that I could build over the course of a semester would have been a significant improvement. With a little gentle prodding ("If you liked today's class, add a comment about it to your evaluation"), I think this could get professors who want it much more, and more useful, feedback.
Posted by: Anon2 | May 20, 2016 10:59:18 AM
I do think that female faculty receive more comments on their appearance than do male faculty. I also believe that most of those comments come from female students. For what it's worth, I am male and I have received comments about my physical appearance, including specific types of plastic surgery that I "need" to have.
Posted by: anon | May 20, 2016 10:32:41 AM
Just a comment on pandering to evaluations. It is often (though not always) possible to ratchet up evaluations by pandering, by emphasizing clarity over ambiguity, providing detailed outlines to students and leading them to believe that knowing rules/principles is the key to success. But the fault lies with the Professors who pander rather than the students who reward it, and I think the same is true for law review writing. The excessive length, footnoting and repetition of law reviews are attributable to Professors not the ill-informed student law review editors.
Posted by: MLS | May 20, 2016 9:06:47 AM
The way to solve student evaluations is to make them voluntary. Law students generally do not want to complete evaluations; students are busy, and evaluations usually are done at the end of class. Students will usually only write meaningful evaluations for the very worst or very best professors. The very worst professors will get extensive write-ups because students want to let them know how they failed. The very best will get anonymous thank yous. Middle of the road professors will receive notes of white noise. By making evaluations voluntary, only students with something to say will complete them.
Posted by: Andres | May 20, 2016 6:34:29 AM
And I love this (from the linked article):
“Women are frequently targets of evaluative commentary that, in addition to being wildly inappropriate and adolescent, is almost never directed at men.”
Of course this says nothing about appearance commentary, but even assuming it does, I guess I’m THAT unusual? “Almost never,” and yet I, as a male professor, receive such comments literally every semester? Anyway, what is the basis for his straight-talkish tone of virtue-signaling certainty?
“[A]fter a lifetime of hearing these stories, I know it when I see it. Anyone who doubts this would find it instructive to stop by and ask any one of our female professors about this and similar dynamics.”
Ah, that settles it then.
Posted by: SPOC | May 19, 2016 11:53:02 PM
I find it somewhat refreshing that Professor Zug did not default to the common assumption that appearance comments on evals are “gendered” and/or sexist. As a male professor I get them all the time; about my hair, clothing, body parts, etc. And both negative and positive.
I’m not sure if there’s ever been a study examining whether such eval comments are made with meaningfully more frequency about female professors, but I suspect that the assumption that they are (and/or that such any difference in frequency reflects sexism) is an example of the currently fashionable squinting-to-gender-non-gendered-problems phenomenon.
Posted by: SPOC | May 19, 2016 11:31:31 PM
I pass out a very detailed/specific evaluation that I draft specific to the feedback I most want. I find I get very useful feedback that way. I agree the feedback from more generic evaluations is not always as useful
Posted by: Anon | May 19, 2016 9:56:38 PM
I actually have gotten lots of constructive feedback from students that I've used to tweak my approach (or, at least, comments that affirm students found useful something I had hoped they would find useful). I don't know if it has helped that I emphasize with them that I welcome their feedback and take it VERY seriously, and that I really appreciate their helping me figure out what I'm doing right and what I could do better for future classes-- so they feel a bit of responsibility, and that I'm listening. My sample size is not large, though (<150 students total), so I may have just had good luck.
Posted by: alex roberts | May 19, 2016 9:29:17 PM
By peer review do you mean classroom visits?
Posted by: brad | May 19, 2016 5:22:04 PM
I completely agree with Anon. Compliments are as inappropriate as negative comments because they reflect the writer's belief that appearance is part of the criteria for assessing a faculty member's performance.
I disagree with much of what Brad said. The reason to analyze the teaching of those of us with tenure would be to prevent the possibility of a decreased commitment to strong teaching. While many of our conscientious colleagues continue to honor that commitment, unfortunately some do not. I also don't believe the dichotomy between senior and non-senior faculty is warranted.
More importantly, though, is that all of this points to the ineffectiveness of student evals generally. Most students have not studied or considered pedagogy. Too often, what they view as "good teaching" is actually pandering. Student evals create the disincentive to be rigorous; as too many students equate "easy" with "good." Student evals also foster the consumerism that undermines quality education, i.e. "the 'customer' is always right" mentality. And, this is all on top of the problems with student evals related to gender and race.
Instead, law faculty (like our colleagues in other areas of the academy) should engage in peer review. Even if not used as a judgment on promotion and tenure decisions, the process could foster useful dialogue among colleagues.
Posted by: AnonProf2 | May 19, 2016 3:53:14 PM
So how do you hold paperclips?
Posted by: Marcus Neff | May 19, 2016 3:40:31 PM
I can't see much reason for a school to require tenured faculty to collect student evaluations. Since the infrastructure is there anyway, sure let them distribute them if they find them useful, but don't make them mandatory.
For pre-tenure and non-tenure track instructors, as imperfect as they might be, they are some signal for the question of teaching quality. And something is better than nothing when it comes to making tenure or retention decisions.
Posted by: brad | May 19, 2016 2:35:20 PM
I tend to read student comments on my or other female professors’ appearance as a reflection of their unconscious gendered norms relating to the idea that women should look certain ways, and that how women look is a central part of their identity/worth. Compliments are, I believe, meant as compliments, but when they come my way I experience them as something of a punch in the gut, because I view them as reflecting a notion that however well I might be doing as a professor part of how I will be judged is this other thing on which I would rather not be judged, and that is not part of my job description. I think we’re failing as law schools if we’re not opening students’ eyes to these kinds of unconscious associations/stereotypes/norms and the harm they can do.
Posted by: Anon | May 19, 2016 1:42:23 PM