Students are not the only ones being graded at the end of each term -- most professors turn the tables on their classes and ask them to evaluate course on the last day.
But the way departments use evaluations varies as much as the different subjects they teach.
Evaluating the evaluations
"I personally feel that we deserve to get feedback from students," Engineering Professor Francis Kennedy said. "They are the output of our endeavors."
Kennedy said a professor's enthusiasm could influence the quality of their evaluations, but said this type of bias may be justified.
"A professor who's more dynamic is probably going to be better at getting the student to listen to what they have to say," he said.
But other professors find fault with the evaluation system.
English Professor Tom Luxon said he didn't distrubute evaluations for a class he taught over the summer, because he did not care what the students had to say.
"About half the students who register for English 24 in the summer are not serious students," he said. "They're there as a gut, and I'm not interested in their evaluations."
Other professors, however, said on the whole, students probably wouldn't let their grades affect how they evaluate professors.
English Department Chair Bill Cook said, "Even though students may publicly howl about the unfairness of a grade, in the anonymity of those evaluations, I don't think large numbers of our students are going to bias our evaluations."
And for some professors, while most student evaluations are fair, grades can cause some fluctuation.
Economics Professor John Menge said he looks at the number of responses evaluating the course positively and negatively, and discounts the extremes of enthusiasm and displeasure to get around student bias caused by grades.
Despite the correlation between grades and the quality of evaluations, Menge said there should be more of an emphasis, not less, on student evaluations, but the College has to take the first step toward using them more widely.
"If the College itself isn't going to do anything, it's not really a priority," he said.
Who gets evaluated
Student evaluations are one of the factors that influence a department's perception of a professor, but each department has a unique policy about how to deal with students' input -- and only some departments require senior professors to have their students complete evaluations.
Anthropology Department Chair Dale Eickelman said all the department's faculty, regardless of rank, are required to give their students evaluations at the end of each term.
He said professors are not in the room when evaluations are distributed and do not see the evaluations, which include both open-ended questions and multiple-choice ones, until after students' grades have been calculated.
Eickelman said professors are responsible for retaining the evaluations for the duration of their tenure at the College.
The evaluations, he said, are referred to during each of non-tenured faculty's annual reviews and are also considered in decisions of tenure and promotion.
"Teaching evaluations -- together with scholarship and research, which we consider an integral part of good teaching -- form an important component of each of these reviews [in the Anthropology department]," he said.
Engineering Professor Francis Kennedy said "everybody in engineering for every course" also hands out evaluations to students.
Kennedy said the evaluations are collected by a student who brings them to the engineering department office, and engineering professors are "insulated" from the evaluations until grades are sent to students.
After the evaluations are collected, students' comments are re-typed and a mean score is computed for each of the questions asking students to rate the professor's performance or the quality of classroom materials, he said.
The faculty member, dean and department chair are each sent a summary of students' comments about the course -- and a copy is available to students on reserve in Feldberg library.
English Department Chair William Cook said student evaluations are very important to his department -- especially when it comes to making tenure decisions.
During inter-department discussions about whether a junior faculty member should receive tenure, any professor in the English department can request to see the professor's evaluations, he said.
Chair of the Art History Department Kathleen Corrigan also said student evaluations of faculty "play an important role in our perception of junior faculty," but only junior faculty members are required to have their students complete the evaluations.
The Drama Department also requires only junior faculty to distribute evaluations to students, according to Drama Department Chair Paul Gaffney.
A similar situation exists in the Economics Department, where only junior faculty and visiting professors are required to hand out evaluations, according to the department's administrative assistant, Karen Pelletier.
Evaluations and tenure decisions
Although all departments ask junior faculty to hand out evaluations to students, professor evaluations are only one in a myriad of factors considered in tenure decisions and are not the only method of judging a faculty member's teaching skills.
Dean of Faculty Edward Berger said students completing a professor's class are not the only ones asked to rate a faculty member's teaching skills -- graduating seniors evaluate the faculty in each of the courses they took during their time at the College.
When a professor comes up for tenure, the Dean's office also solicits letters about a professor's work from a random list of 30 students who have taken one of the teacher's courses, he said.
Eickelman and Corrigan both said other professors are asked to evaluate the teaching skills of junior faculty.
"It's true that, because of a lack of experience in a particular field, student might not be in the best position to judge the quality of a content [of a class]," Corrigan said.
The department's evaluation of a professor's teaching is included in a "dossier" which is sent to the dean of the department's division, who will agree or disagree with the department's judgment.
A professor's dossier, including the department's teaching evaluation, is then sent to the Committee Advising the President. The president forwards the dossier with the CAP's recommendation to the trustees, Cook said.
