Opinion

Evaluating the evaluations

By 2015-09-24T08:52:00

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Simon Lancaster assesses student evaluation in higher education

I once remarked that 99% of all student course evaluations were a waste of time. Of course I made that value up – the real figure is probably much higher. 

What’s my problem with student evaluations? I should probably point out that it’s not sour grapes: I’m happy to share evaluations of my own teaching by our second year inorganic chemistry students below. In that data set our students are replying to a question inspired by the National Student Survey (NSS), ‘The lecturer responded well to student needs at an individual and group level.’ It’s important to note that they are actually asked whether they strongly disagree, disagree, are neutral, agree or strongly agree. They are not being asked to rank me on a scale from 1 to 5. Nevertheless, the practice of mapping these labels to the numerical values is ubiquitous. 

Student-Evaluations-in-HE_Fig1_630m

Figure 1  Lancaster module evaluation

This is where the problems start. These are labels, not numbers – it is meaningless to average them. If half your students have black hair and half are blonde would you then conclude that the average hair colour is brown? Why then have I included the mean in the figure? So I can demolish it later.

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