What My Students Really Think of Me

Yesterday I got back a report about my students' evaluations of me for my teaching assistant job last quarter.  I thought four different sections of the same beginning calculus class.  What I did was hold a review once a week in which I focused on the students' suggested homework assignments.  The students all received e-mails near the end of the quarter asking them to evaluate me, and I received the anonymous results yesterday.

I taught more students than I am used to teaching.  As such, I received a lot more comments than I am used to receiving, including a lot more negative comments than I am used to receiving.  Allison mentioned to me that at least I know what I need to work on.  My gut reaction to her saying that was that no, the negative comments tell me little.  When I thought about it, here are some arguments I came up with of why I take negative comments with a grain of salt.

• For every negative comment there was a positive comment saying the opposite: For example, some people thought I didn't explain things clearly enough; however, there were plenty of people who commented that I explained things clearly.
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• You can't please everyone: I have about 30 students in each of my sections.  It is impossible to please them all and to make sure they are all understanding everything.  Among the comments, here were some examples of suggestions made of how I should organize the class:
  
  1. Didn't explain hard concepts, just gave answers to the homework.
  2. Didn't cover more than a few homework questions and didn't clear up lecture questions.
  3. Go through each topic and go in order
  4. Make sections longer
  What I do in my sections is I take student requests for problems they want to see worked out an explained, and then I do them slowly and try to explain everything well.  To point #1, I did receive comments that said that I did a good job of explaining the concepts behind each problem; if I was just giving homework answers, I would cover a lot more problems (which would take care of #2's concern).  If I framed the presentation in the way #3 said, then student #1 might have had a more positive attitude about what I do.  However, doing something different from their three hours a week lecture, where they do go through topics in order, is beneficial.  Finally, there are a lot of reasons why point #4 is wrong, but I don't see why I needed to have that on my evaluation.  In summary, I try to do what I believe most students want me to do based on past experience; that way just doesn't please everyone.
• Who's commenting: Unfortunately, because on anonymity, I have no idea who or what kind of people are giving me comments.  I wouldn't take a comment from someone who came to section once or twice with the same seriousness as I would from someone who came weekly and also visited my office hours.  What I do know is that the people commenting are overwhelmingly freshmen.  When I see that, the devil on my shoulder says that they don't really know what they are talking about because this is their first college math class.  I also noticed that when a comment used my name (Chris) instead of "TA", the comment was always positive; among other things, this tells me that negative comments probably came from people who didn't come to my section often.
• Negative response bias: The students were encouraged to evaluate me, but at its core this was optional.  According to the report, only 58% of the students enrolled actually filled it out.  As I learned in my high-school statistics class, people with a negative opinion are more likely to respond to a voluntary survey then people with a positive opinion.

I actually took a positive out of the evaluations however.  I only got one response saying that at times my writing was hard to read.  At the beginning of grad school, I got several such comments each quarter.  I take it as a good sign that my handwriting is improving.