Course Evaluations push professors to perform with the threat of Trump

It’s that time of year again. The ground is thawing, the library is filling, and head-hunting Frisbees are handing out unsuspecting black eye after the next out on the quad. It’s spring, the end of the semester, the end of college for some, a season of nearly perpetual change and yet one thing remains a constant: Course Evaluations. Though certainly meaningful to professors, it must be said that us students, especially those who have filled out upwards of 30 Evals over the course of their Keene State College educations, can safely say that they rarely rank higher than 126 on our personal priority meters. By the time they are handed out, most students are either too checked out or too stressed out to care, thus scribbling a series of placations and N/A’s before packing up and scrambling out the door. What we may not realize, however, what is not always made clear, is that our professors’ careers may rely on what are ultimately our afterthoughts.

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Just think about it, what other faculty performance assessing actions does the college enact? Very few, and, in fact, no others that take actual student opinion into account. Course Evaluations remain one of a KSC student’s only classroom-altering voices, and yet they are unfortunately and inherently flawed, relying too heavily upon negative reinforcement as a motivational tool. You see, with Course Evals comprising the preponderance of professor performance information, KSC is thus forced to consider them thoroughly, which they do, and make possibly job terminating decisions based upon the material that they present.

The issue, then, is that if a professor receives overwhelmingly positive evaluations they are not given nearly the same consideration they would get if they receive overwhelmingly poor evaluations. On one end of the spectrum, a professor can lose his or her job, and perhaps rightfully so if their classroom generally suffers, but on the other end of the spectrum, the end that KSC should care most about, professors are offered, at most, a pat on the back and another year employed on the tenure track.

So in the end KSC needs to consider what kind of motivational message they are sending to both their students and faculty. Are faculty going to be encouraged to improve their craft and strengthen their classrooms because they are concerned about not being able to pay heating bills if they don’t? Or would they be better motivated by incentive, striving toward improvement not out of fear but out of a desire to succeed as an educator and, of course, be recognized as such? The answer is clearly the latter and so, although students should move toward Course Evaluations with an accurate sense of their importance, KSC should follow in their footsteps; perhaps this time with a carrot instead of the whip.

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