Opinion
JENNIFER CALFAS
EDITOR IN CHIEF
AARICA MARSH
and DEREK WOLFE
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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Monday, December 7, 2015
Student evaluations:
Treat with caution
Not too long ago, researchers
at a large Midwestern university
arranged to have a speaker give the
same lecture to 154 undergraduates
enrolled in eight sections of a
required course. Or almost the
same lecture: One small detail was
different in half of the sections,
so let’s call them lecture A and
lecture B. Afterward, the students
filled out a “teacher evaluation
form.” The first part asked about
the
teacher’s
competence
and
character, the second one asked
how
much
the
students
had
learned. Part three consisted of four
open-ended questions.
Most students had good things to
say about either lecture: 97 percent
of them had some positive comment
on lecture A, 96 percent on lecture
B, though lecture A received more
positive comments than lecture
B (412 vs. 339). When it came to
negative
comments,
though,
a
starkly different picture emerged:
Just 30 percent of the students had
critical things to say about lecture
A, but 79 percent disliked something
about lecture B. Lecture A received
a total of 52 negative comments.
Lecture B, 205 — almost four times
as many.
So what was the difference? Same
lecture, same speaker, same class.
But in lecture A, the male teacher
referred in passing to “my partner
Jennifer.” In lecture B, he casually
mentioned “my partner Jason.”
The result? Students reported that
they had learned much less from
the “gay” teacher than from the
“straight” teacher: On a 10-point
scale, the mean for the purportedly
gay teacher was 5.85; for the
purportedly
straight
one,
8.51.
And in response to the question
of whether the school should hire
the instructor, an overwhelming
93 percent of students would have
“unquestionably” hired his straight
incarnation. But just 30 percent
of students said they “might” hire
the gay one, with a paltry 8 percent
saying “definitely.”
Would the same shocking picture
emerge at the University now? I
sincerely hope not. But we don’t
know: The University does not
collect data on our faculty’s sexual
orientation (thank you, University).
And even if it did, it would not tell
you very much: Only controlled,
randomized studies like the one
above can give you any reliable
insight into the effect bias has on
student evaluations. And we have not
done such studies at the University.
If we had, we would have looked at
gender, race and national origin. Or
even (though I shudder to think how)
at “attractiveness” — hot teachers
(please insert your own scare
quotes) get better ratings. There’s a
reason Rate My Professors openly
(and repugnantly) invites students to
comment on their professors’ looks.
Of course, none of us believe that
we are those people who would
judge a teacher on the basis of his or
her skin color, ab definition, erotic
preference or comic timing. But I
know this: If our more than 40,000
students (or our thousands of faculty,
staff and administrators) were free
of misogyny, racism, homophobia,
Islamophobia and whatever other
bias you are worried about (if you
worry about these things, as I
believe we should), an army of social
science researchers would descend
on our lovely town to study this
unicorn population.
Last month, the Daily published
a
well-balanced
piece
on
our
current collective discussion about
publicizing
course
evaluations.
Here is one paragraph that caught
my attention:
“(Mika)
LaVaque-Manty
said
based on his research, individual
bias due to gender and race is
evident in classrooms, both in open-
ended comments and quantitative
measurements. However, he also
stressed that those biases tend
to disappear from the overall
quantitative data, except for some
instances of gender bias appearing
when data is analyzed at the
departmental level.”
I have the highest respect for my
colleague Mika, but I’m not sure
what to make of this. Bias does not
“disappear”; it only gets masked. A
faculty member who receives lower
rankings because she is Black, or
gay, or wearing a hijab will not feel
any better because a cursory look
at aggregate data paints a rosier
picture.
But unconscious bias and the
much rarer instances of open
bigotry are not the only reasons we
should think very carefully about
student evaluations, and even more
carefully about making them public.
Study after study confirms that
the strongest correlation between
rankings and teaching is a single
measure: “My expected grade is…”
This is true at the University, and
it is particularly true at the polar
ends: On average, the most lenient
graders get the highest rankings
(which doesn’t mean that leniently
graded classes cannot be fantastic
for all sorts of reasons), the harshest
ones get the lowest rankings (and
again, a strictly graded class could
of course also be sub-par for any
number of unrelated reasons). This
is not surprising: Why would you
rank highly a professor who just
messed up your GPA? Why would
you not think kind thoughts about
the one who made your life easier?
And why would you not want to
know in advance which is which?
According to the research, the
quickest way to improve your stu-
dent evaluations is to give every-
body an A. Or to cynically game the
system. One faculty member told
me, to my horror, “Oh, I grade the
midterms really leniently and then
I hit them on the final, after they
hand in their evals.”
Students have told us that they
are particularly interested in the
answers to two questions: “expected
grade” and “workload.” I get it. It’s
perfectly legitimate to try and bal-
ance your workload. It’s perfectly
legitimate to worry about your GPA.
But it is less clear to me whether we,
as an institution of higher learning,
should assist students in finding the
easiest classes. Worst-case scenario:
the easier the class, the higher the
enrollments, to the detriment of the
difficult, challenging and perhaps
uncomfortable classes that can lead
to real intellectual growth. Con-
versely, what about faculty who’d
prefer to teach smaller classes? Less
grading, more time for research,
right? Easy fix: Grade on a C-minus
curve. If you have a thick skin and
don’t care much about your pub-
lic profile, your own workload just
got lighter.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not sug-
gesting that good grades reflect
problematic teaching or that a harsh
grader is automatically a more chal-
lenging teacher — far from it. Per-
sonally, I’d be happy to do away with
grades altogether. I’m also not sug-
gesting that evaluations don’t tell
you anything worth knowing or that
I don’t trust the great majority of
students. To be fair, I have gotten a
great deal of valuable feedback from
my own sets (in particular from the
open comments). As a department
chair, I do look at evaluations as one
way to get a sense of how my col-
leagues are doing in the classroom.
But like all my fellow chairs and like
everybody I know who is engaged in
hiring or promotion decisions, I treat
that information with considerable
caution, as data that needs to be read
in context.
That said, I believe strongly that
students should be able to find out
more about the classes they are tak-
ing. But student evaluations are just
a small piece of the puzzle, and not
a particularly reliable one. In fact, a
task force at the University recently
concluded that “in courses (with)
fewer than 50 students, regardless
of the response rate, the evaluation
is close to random.” Since just 18
percent of our classes enroll more
than 50 students, that means that in
82 percent of them, the evaluations
may tell you next to nothing about
the quality of the education you are
likely to receive.
In my personal and entirely unsci-
entific experience, this rings true. I
got one of my highest ratings ever for
a class that I know was terrible. Not
because I don’t generally care about
teaching, but because my brother
had just died, and I was consumed by
grief. So this time around, I did not
care much about teaching. I didn’t
care much about my students. I didn’t
care much about anything at all. I
graded on auto-pilot. I gave almost
everybody an A, not because I wanted
good evaluations but because I didn’t
want to punish students for what I
knew was my problem, not theirs. If
my evaluations had been public, you
would have learned that most of my
students “strongly agreed” that they
had attended an “excellent class”
by an “excellent teacher.” They did
not. They had attended a badly pre-
pared and badly taught class by a
very sad teacher whose thoughts
were elsewhere.
Is there better information out
there? Not really — and that’s a sig-
nificant problem that students should
indeed clamor to see addressed. Here
is what I believe would help: first, a
required link to a detailed syllabus
for each course listing; second, a
required substantial course descrip-
tion detailing the goals of the class,
the material to be investigated, the
balance between lecturing, discus-
sion and engaged learning activities
and the nature of assessments; and
lastly, significantly improved aca-
demic advising (my daughter waited
three months for an appointment
and only got help after I sent a note
complaining about the fact that her
e-mails went unanswered).
All of that would provide infor-
mation much more important than
access to a set of data that is likely
quite random, pervaded by bias,
tied to grade inflation, measuring
nobody-quite-knows-what and likely
to create anxiety and even public
shame in a good number of perfectly
wonderful faculty members, particu-
larly vulnerable ones, such as lectur-
ers or untenured professors.
I should stress that I am not
opposed to giving students access
to these data, in the context of good
academic advising, as long as every-
body knows what they can and can-
not tell you. But don’t kid yourself:
Doing so will not improve teaching
at the University; it actually might do
the opposite.
Instead, we should work togeth-
er to find better ways to assess
teaching and better ways to share
information about courses, and,
perhaps most importantly, to cre-
ate an atmosphere in which we
treat each other with thought, care
and respect. Students pay for their
education, and it’s not cheap, to
put it mildly. But that doesn’t mean
that a college class is a consumer
good like any other. Teachers are
humans, and to grade them on a
five-point scale as if they were a
microwave oven on Amazon in and
of itself runs the risk of devaluing
this great shared enterprise that is
the University.
Teaching and learning go togeth-
er. The quality of a class depends
on the professor; it also depends on
the students. Remember Question
3 on our evals: “I learned a great
deal from this course”? To be sure,
it is the professor’s responsibility to
create the conditions under which
you can learn a great deal. But if you
are a student, whether you actually
learn a great deal is also up to you.
Did you do all the homework? Did
you attend all the lectures? Did you
turn off your cellphone during class
and close out of Facebook? Were
you curious and engaged? Did you
treat your teacher — and the very
act of learning — with respect?
At present, it seems that we will
thoroughly revise our current ques-
tionnaire and begin to share these
new evaluation data with students
beginning in Fall 2016. And to repeat,
I am fine with that — provided we
do so carefully and responsibly, tak-
ing into account everything we know
and everything we know that we
don’t know, with respect for students
and teachers alike.
Silke-Maria Weineck is chair
of the Department of Comparative
Literature, chair of the Senate Advisory
Committee on University Affairs and
a professor of German studies.
SILKE-MARIA WEINECK | VIEWPOINT
It’s time to divest
DIVEST AND INVEST | VIEWPOINT
It’s been quite the semester for Divest and
Invest, the student group campaigning for
the divestment of the $1 billion the University
endowment
has
invested
in
the
fossil
fuel industry.
The fight for divestment extends far beyond
campus, and the movement as a whole is building
steam. Around the world, over 500 institutions
have divested $3.4 trillion, and in the past
10 weeks alone, 100 more pledged to divest,
according to Fossil Free. Leonardo DiCaprio,
the University of Massachusetts and Allianz, the
world’s largest insurance company, are among
recent divesters. Just this week, Bill Gates and
other philanthropists announced plans to create
a groundbreaking renewable energy fund,
highlighting the other equally important side of
the Divest and Invest equation.
People the world over consider divestment
worthwhile, but the campaign at the University
has met much resistance from the administration.
At a meeting with Divest students last August,
University President Mark Schlissel said that our
$10 billion endowment isn’t a political tool. Not a
political tool? We at Divest were a little confused
by that logic, and Naomi Klein, an environmental
journalist, activist and best-selling author of
“This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The
Climate,” agrees.
Klein spoke at Rackham last month, and when
we asked her how she would respond to our
administration, she said, “Get on the right side of
history … Being apolitical in the face of this crisis
is not one of the options available to us.” Frankly,
the University’s argument is nothing more than
an excuse to pursue a path that may seem easier
but is morally unacceptable. An investment is
an unquestionable show of support; a politically
neutral investment is an impossibility.
Just two weeks later, the Senate Assembly
gave our campaign its stamp of approval,
voting to endorse a resolution that calls for the
formation of a committee under the University’s
Board of Regents committee to investigate
divestment. This decision echoes that of CSG
from last year, which voted 32-2 to endorse the
committee. Taken together, these developments
have important implications.
Here’s why: For an issue to merit the formation
of a committee to consider divestment at the
University, a three-pronged precedent must be
met. We’ve already covered two prongs, showing
that the activities of the fossil fuel industry are
antithetical to the University’s core values and
that the fossil fuel industry is uniquely responsible
for the underlying issue of climate change. All that
remained was proving a consensus on campus
surrounding the underlying issue — in this case
anthropogenic climate change — and the CSG
and Senate Assembly resolutions accomplish
precisely that. Therefore, we have now used
every democratic tool at our disposal to push for
the formation of this ad hoc regents committee.
How has the administration responded, you may
ask? With deafening silence.
Silence isn’t particularly conducive to progress,
so we showed up to the last regents meeting to
remind the administration that ignoring our
requests won’t make us, or this issue, disappear.
Supporters of Divest packed the meeting room,
applauding loudly as campaigners reminded the
regents of their duty to form a committee and
asked them to honor a simple request to meet
with campaign members, so that Wolverines may
share the pride of those who have already chosen
to stand on the right side of history.
Paralleling our work, 195 countries are
currently meeting at the COP21 conference in
Paris to discuss the creation of binding climate
change legislation. This meeting has the potential
to create a global climate change agreement. The
beginning of COP21 was met by movements
in Paris and other parts of the world. These
activists aim to pressure our world leaders to
become more sustainable and create legislation
to curtail the negative effects of climate change,
and some have personal stakes in the issue, such
as a poet and climate activist from the Marshall
Islands who is calling for fossil fuel divestment
in fear of seeing the beautiful country disappear
under rising sea levels. Others are simply trying
to urge public institutions to create policies that
will mitigate climate change. When it comes to
climate change activism, the University has not
been left out.
To show solidarity with those fighting for
climate justice in Paris, Divest and Invest is
hosting a Pledge to the Planet Climate Action
Week. The week coincides with COP21, allowing
students an opportunity to engage with our
campaign to create a fossil fuel-free future and
mitigate climate change. This Action Week kicks
off this Monday, so stop by the Diag to learn more
about the events this week, and create your own
personal pledge to sustainability. Tuesday, we’re
hosting a panel discussion at 5:30 p.m. in Room
1040 of the Dana Building, in which climate
professionals will discuss the implications of
COP21. Wednesday, there will be a free screening
of the documentary “Merchants of Doubt”
at 5 p.m. in the same location. Thursday and
Friday, we ask students to spread knowledge
on climate change activism by talking to
friends and preparing for Saturday’s Michigan
Climate March.
The Michigan Climate March creates an
opportunity for members of the community to
send a message to the state of Michigan. Fossil
fuel use must be curtailed in order to create
a sustainable society. The dangers of climate
change are quite real and affect people, even in
our own state. Taking part in climate activism
at home allows students to stand in solidarity
with activists across the world. Together,
we can create a community that pressures
world leaders to develop policy that mitigates
climate change and protects vulnerable
populations. Furthermore, as leaders meet in
Paris to discuss a just transition to this clean
future, we must push for the state of Michigan
to do the same.
It is time our community takes a stance in
solidarity to pressure our world leaders and
our public institutions to stop their negative
practices. Students and members of the
community have an amazing opportunity
to fight for a more sustainable future, and as
members of this society and residents of this
planet, it is our responsibility to do so.
Anna Silver and Max Lubell wrote this piece
on behalf of the Divest and Invest campaign.
Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Ben Keller, Minsoo Kim, Payton
Luokkala, Aarica Marsh, Anna Polumbo-Levy, Jason Rowland, Lauren
Schandevel, Melissa Scholke, Rebecca Tarnopol, Ashley Tjhung,
Stephanie Trierweiler, Mary Kate Winn, Derek Wolfe
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
E-mail joE at jiovino@umich.Edu
JOE IOVINO