Teacher Evaluations Superfluous,Says Student
Maria Melucci
To the Editor:
The letters in the November–December issue responding to the July–August article by Paul Trout regarding student evaluations of teachers was of special interest to me. I am a full-time college undergraduate student who only recently filled out the evaluations for last semester required by my institution; so the experience is fresh in my mind.
The comments made by the letter writers seemed to me to be sensible and well thought out, but the points they referred to in the Trout article also seemed to me to have some merit.
The concept that teacher evaluations somehow shift the power and grading privilege from the faculty to the students, however, does not. My reasons for stating this are two.
First, some of my teachers asked for comments additional to the machine-read format in order to find out in what ways students believed that a course could be improved. Second, if a particular course or, more especially, a teacher of a course, seemed inferior regarding qualifications or attitude, or we just had a personality clash, I dropped the course. I "voted with my feet."
This may sound arrogant, but life is too short to spend it wrangling in unnecessary conflict; one might as well conserve one’s patience for the conflicts that cannot be avoided to the benefit of all concerned.
For the reasons I have stated, I frequently find that student evaluations of teachers are superfluous and even embarrassing. The very fact that I am still in the class at the end of the semester when the evaluations are submitted is evidence enough of my interest in the subject matter and respect for the instructor.
Maria Melucci
(Philosophy)
College of New Jersey
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