How our current teacher evaluation system is failing our students

Students are the future. And school can alter their entire lives. Even deeper, inside school, each individual teacher has the ability to influence their students lives for the better or for the worse.

Yet as I go around speaking to students, I find an overwhelming majority of students simply try to avoid “bad teachers” instead of finding amazing ones.

Why is this so? Why can’t we match students with good teachers? Is it simply a misunderstanding?

Daniel works at the pool. For him a good teacher is understanding, knowledgeable, and kind. While a bad teacher is strict, misunderstanding, and unreachable. “I got to instruct the elective swim class, so it was a change from being taught. Cool experience being on the other end”

Before we can see if there is a misunderstanding/miscommunication lets try to understand what both sides are. On one side we have students, and on the other side we have the Evaluation Department. Whether a teacher is good or not should not matter, instead it is the student’s feedback and what the Evaluation Department makes of that.

On multiple occasions I have reached out to Baruch’s Evaluation Department and President to have a discussion about their current systems, but I received no response. So I must focus on what information is publicly available.

Alice’s favorite teacher was funny, gave clear explanations, and had a genuine interest of their topic. Her worst would repeat an explanation over and over, had a confusing grading system, and was just boring.

At the end of every semester Baruch students are sent teacher evaluations to fill out. These surveys usually comprise of 10 scale based questions, each follows the same format and asks about a certain quality of a teacher/class on a scale of 1 — 5

The qualities that are asked are:

• Course Organization
• Communication Of Goals
• Communication Of Requirements
• How helpful was the book (textbook)
• Preparedness
• Communication Of Content
• Helped Students In Learning
• Provided Feedback
• Assignment Grade Turnaround
• Availability Outside of Class
• Learning Environment
• Respected Students
• Enthusiasm
• Clear Rubric

Bryan (Pictured going up the escalator in a grey hoodie) likes teachers that are nice, understanding, and fun. While avoiding teachers who are unrealistic, selfish, and difficult.

Instead of trying to come up with what makes a teacher good. I decided to survey students about the characteristics of their favorite and most despised teachers. I found that by giving the students a specific teacher to keep in mind, they were able to give more accurate results.

The top 3 positive characteristics were “understanding” ,“knowledgeable” and “passionate”. While the top 3 negative characteristics were “rude” “monotone” and “ignorant”.

Gent performs best when a teacher is caring, disciplined, and kind. His worst teacher was self centered, arrogant, and single-minded.When I asked him for any funny or crazy stories, he said “I had this accounting teacher, who made the entire class essay based. AN ACCOUNTING CLASS, essay based. Anyways it didn’t take long for him to be replaced”

Immediately it can be seen that these qualities are qualitative while the teacher evaluation issued by the school asked quantitative questions.

Eric was playing an adventure game called “Sunless Sea” when he told me that he likes teachers who ramble a lot, are funny, and relaxed. On the other hand he stays away from teachers who are strict, overload their students, and are close minded. He recalled a funny situation with a professor “ During COVID, one of my teachers was playing Genshin Impact (An action role-playing game) during class, he would explain things well. But while we were in breakout rooms, if you needed to ask a question he would answer while playing that game.”

This leads to a simple conclusion. Students care more about the personality of a professor rather than specific actions. Although I would like to jump to the secondary conclusion that if the professor has positive personality characteristics that would influence specific quantitative aspects, that requires another survey which I wish to issue after this report.

Mftahul was serving as an ambassador for Baruch’s writing center when she told me she liked teachers who had strong teaching skills, were friendly, and caring. She had bad memories from teachers who were uncaring, overloaded the students, and were very rude. “I loved how interactive lab was, the teacher let us work on the midterm all together (the whole class). I work a lot better in teams. Even though I thought I would not understand a concept, she made sure we had everything in our head.”

I was able to speak with some of the students pictured about their opinions regarding the current evaluation questions. None said that they felt it benefited them in any way, and the questions were often hard to answer because “different individuals answer differently on a scale without units”. A teachers turnaround time for grading may be fantastic for one student but horrible for another. Anyone looking at the results of the evaluation would find the data unusable due to how subjective it is.

Michelle joined the writing center’s table and said “My favorite professor was detailed, laid back, and understandable. And uh my worst was difficult, not understanding, and out of date”. When I asked if she had in interesting story, she told me about the time her teacher had to keep running back and forth because the projector screen would not stay down.

Yet the school’s official evaluation system is not the only way to understand students response to a teacher. Every student has heard of and most have used a platform called Rate My Professor where students can leave anonymous reviews.

I was able to speak to multiple students and teachers regarding this platform and both parties stated that reviews left on RMP are hyper-opinionated and normally oscillate between extreme positive or negative.

Sam (pictured in the center with a black t-shirt) described his favorite teacher as resourceful, knowledgeable, and understanding. While his worst was rude, unaccommodating, and discouraging. “One of my teachers was actually a director and producer for a long running Broadway show. The students were allowed to go for free and it was amazing watching her perform”

The professors that I spoke to told me that they fear for their reputation since anyone can leave reviews anonymously and very often students have left unfair and slanderous reviews. In one example the professor (to remain unnamed) had to fail a student who did not show up to any classes nor submit assignments, and after that the student left a RMP review full of lies that left the professor fearing for his career.

Alejandro told me about a teacher that only cared about the color of the essay. “He had boots so far up his ass, essays could be in black or blue. But if an essay that would normally have been a 100 was written in rose he would fail it.

Meanwhile, the students I spoke to regarding RMP stated that using the reviews to help decide which professors to pick was still a “gamble”. Interestingly, RMP is owned by Altice USA News, Inc and seems to profit off selling its users data. What is their goal? Profit and help students, or just profit and sell data?

Laxmi wanted a teacher who was wholesome, adorable, and knowledgeable. And despised the idea of a teacher being egotistical, selfish, and stubborn. “One professor was cute as a turtle, even though he was in his late 80’s he would walk up all 13 flights of stairs for his classes.”

The current evaluation system does not get the results that students care about. Alternatives have hurt teachers without helping students on the same level. While there is a lot more data to collect and many more students/professors to speak to. One thing is clear, the current method of teacher evaluations is not working for students, and something needs to be done about this. For the sake of our education and our futures