A highlight for me in the “these evals are so useless” category is from one semester in which I got my hair cut about half way through. I received so many comments about my new haircut (pro and con), it was unbelievable. I did not need to know that for 1/2 a semester all my students were filling up class time by mentally evaluating the quality of my haircut rather than listening to what I was saying.

(And it wasn’t even a particularly dramatic haircut. It wasn’t like I showed up one day with purple hair.)

But that was the only thing I ever learned from teaching evals. Negative ones seldom do anything but rant: they never have reasons for the dissatisfaction, or offer constructive criticism. Once I got an obscene fantasy one, too: ick and double-ick. Finally, feedback from these things often is useless for another reason: opinion nearly always is divided. Half the class will say they hate having discussions, for instance, while the other half will say it’s the best part of the course. My conclusion is that I may as well do what I prefer.

Although, I confess to one or two bad ones that make me laugh to this day. “Too much focus on sleaze and horny detail,” is my favorite. Then the one that wrote on an evaluation for the first half of the U.S. survey: “why do we have to learn so much about slavery? Yes, it was bad, can we just move on and learn about the real history?” One student informed me that they were praying for my soul. Otherwise, nothing concrete to make the class better or my teaching better.

On my blog you asked about a word meter. Wander on over to my blog, or Crazy’s, and just click on the meter! It’ll take you – zap! – to the website.

In my early teaching years, sometimes the evaluations had useful information. (This was before PowerPoint, so “please give us a lecture outline” was a useful comment, for example. I know it seems obvious, but I didn’t do that until a student back in the 1990s pointed it out.) But I agree with your point in the main, which is that students aren’t really qualified to evaluate our teaching in the ways that are the most helpful. What I get in my teaching evals now is mostly confirmation that I’m someone people rarely feel neutral about: some students really, really dig me, some students really resent me, but that’s not something I think I can or should do anything about.