Surely we all know by now that student evaluations are an inaccurate measure of successful teaching?

Surely we are aware of the ways that race, gender, and even beauty, determine student evaluations? And that they correlate to grades? Or that distributing candy makes a difference?

And yet …

There is nothing more gut-wrenching, anxiety-producing, and self-doubt creating than bad evaluations. Even when you know beyond a reasonable doubt that they are not a reliable source of information about the quality of your teaching, is there anything worse than being condemned by your students?

You may ask why I am thinking about student evals at this point in the semester, when the end is still many weeks away. It’s Yearly Review time here at Mid-State U. and, in compiling my teaching materials I made a tragic mistake and looked at my evals from last year. I generally don’t read them. I put them on a bottom shelf behind a door and forget all about them. I know what a black hole they are — that even if 90% are rave reviews, I will be staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m. thinking about the other 10% who criticized me.

This time it’s worse than usual because I had a particularly bad class last year, one terrorized by a little gang of smart ass students who would come swaggering in to class everyday, sit in a huddle together, talk and pass notes in class, disagree with everything I said, smirk at everything their fellow students said, and generally radiate scorn for we lesser-mortals. The worst part about it: they were really smart. And I was really burnt out. A deadly combination. Their comments were usually insightful and interesting, but delivered with palpable condescension. I was slow to catch on to their attitude and inconsistent with my policing of their behavior. I didn’t realize until too late that they had bullied the entire class, including me, into a defensive posture.

Today I read the reviews written by these students and, naturally, they’ve taken the time to write copious comments, describing what they see as the outrageous failures of my pedagogy. Their accusations are well-stated, detailed, and compelling — not the least because they clearly consulted beforehand and all of the critiques are identical. (I can’t help imagining the conversations they had about me after every class, rolling their eyes over my terrible teaching, congratulating themselves for being so much smarter than me, and coming to a consensus about the ways I sucked.)

I don’t know what I hate more: that the administrators who will read my file will be likely to believe these students (and disregard the other evals with concise but unconvincing reviews like “Great!” and “Good job”) or that I find myself taking their critiques to heart. I can’t believe that they are still bullying me!

Did I mention that this was a graduate seminar? And that the students in question all plan to become academics and teachers? The only consolation I have right now is the prospect that maybe, one day, they too will be reading their evaluations and cringing at the thought that they once had so little compassion for the challenges of teaching.

Many others have written about this problem, including a memorable post a few years ago at Bitch PhD. Just for good measure, I’ll throw in a cranky rant by Stanley Fish, who writes that student evaluations “are invitations to grind axes without any fear of challenge or discovery.” I’m not a fan of the Fishster, but I take a great deal of satisfaction from the picture he paints of himself tossing his evals in the garbage and never looking back. (Ah, to be tenured and famous.)

As for me, since I cannot avoid my own evals (at least until I get the elusive golden mantle of tenure), I can only try to drown out the snide voices of these students (which sound awfully like my own personal demons) with the voices of friends, real and virtual.