It's getting towards the end of term, and you know what that means: student feedback forms for all of your lectures. But there's a few things you might not know about these teaching evaluations.
Firstly, the government intends to use your feedback on teaching (specifically in the form of the National Student Survey, or NSS) to allow universities to charge you higher tuition fees, through something called the Teaching Excellence Framework or TEF. Some people (including the British Medical Association) think this alone is a good enough reason to boycott the NSS, but we'll leave that up to you.
Secondly, your lecturers and TAs actually read the anonymous feedback you give, and take it to heart. This can be a very nice feeling, like when a student notices something we've worked hard to improve or appreciates the extra effort we've gone to, or a very bad feeling, like when a student makes negative comments about our appearance, our personality or our intelligence. In fact, almost every one of the countless articles online that advise lecturers on how to deal with student feedback has advice along the lines of 'don't take it personally'. We cherish every positive comment we get, often for years, but the negative ones can sting pretty badly.
Finally, and most importantly, it has been established that teaching evaluations are subject to all kinds of bias. Women and people of colour consistently receive worse feedback than their white, male colleagues. (Very little research is done on bias in teaching evaluations against non-heterosexual people, people with disabilities, and non-gender conforming people.) Because teaching evaluations are often used in decisions about who to hire or who to promote, bias in teaching evaluations can lead to fewer women and people of colour progressing in their careers.
That's why this topic relevant to this blog: bias in teaching evaluations contributes to pay inequalities and more time spent on zero-hours and casualised contracts for the victims of that bias. This in turn leads to lower pensions for women and people of colour, since the introduction of career-average pensions.
To be clear, we don't want to do away with teaching evaluations completely: they are a very useful tool for us to improve our teaching and evaluate changes we've made in our modules (this is especially true when we use them during the term, when there is still time to make changes). Additionally, hearing students' perspectives can let us see things in a new light, giving us fresh ideas and highlighting areas for improvement. We really welcome constructive feedback!
But we reject to their use as a tool for university administrators to evaluate and decide on the worth of teaching staff individually and departments as a whole. We think they are another brick in the wall of corporatization in higher education. And we certainly reject the idea of linking good feedback to higher tuition fees.
So what can you do to help? You can keep all this in mind the next time a teaching evaluation comes your way. You can query members UCL's Senior Management Team on what they're doing to address these issues. You can contact your local parliamentary candidates about what they intend to do about the TEF. And you can continue to support our strike to fight back against casualisation, pay inequality, and damage to our pensions.
You can read more about bias in teaching evaluations, and why it's bad for both students and teachers, at the following links.
- Gender and cultural bias in student evaluations: Why representation matters
- Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers. It Hurts Students.
- Student Evaluations and Gendered Expectations: What We Can't Count Can Hurt Us
- Student Evaluations: Feared, Loathed, and Not Going Anywhere
- Student Evaluations, Grade Inflation, and Declining Student Effort
- Student Evaluations of Teaching are Not Valid
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