Writing Evaluations

Regardless of your profession, most of you will write many more evaluations than you think will. 

In nearly every office, raises, promotions, reprimand and firings are all based on written evaluations.  Obviously teachers spend a fair portion of their time evaluating students, but so do people in the military, who must constantly "grade" their subordinates.  People who work in banks write up evaluations of customers seeking loans, and the managers and president of the bank write up evaluations of everyone else working in the bank.  And so on.

Many of you will also write an obscene number of letters of recommendation, which are also a form of evaluations.

Evaluations Vs. Opinions

The problem is that up to this point the majority of you have only been evaluated (primarily by your teachers) and your exposure to writing evaluations has been limited to teacher-evaluations.

And the problem with the teacher evaluations you have been writing for this university is that they are not really evaluations, and if you approach evaluating your staff the way you evaluate your teachers, you will probably be sued or fired.

Consider, for example, that when you evaluate your professors here at the university, you need not cite a single piece of objective evidence to support your judgment.  If, for example, the evaluation form asks you whether or not the professor was prepared for class, you do not need to prove he was or was not prepared ; you simply offer up your subjective opinion. 

And you don't even need to put your name on the line to offer up this opinion, so that, in fact, that opinion can never be challenged: the opinion of a A+ student counts the same as that of a student who never showed up for class, never read the assignments or notes, failed all the tests etc.

And this misleads you into thinking that evaluations and opinions are the same thing. When, in fact, they are perhaps the opposite of each other.

Because in contrast to the way you evaluate your professors, when your professor evaluates your performance he must stick to the specific criteria cited in the syllabus, which he must present on the very first day of class, and cite very specific evidence of which criteria you met; this evidence must be backed by numerical data: test and quiz scores, grades on papers, dates you did or did not attend class (if that was in the syllabus).

Lawsuits

If you do not agree with the grade awarded for that class, you have recourse to certain protections, and the evaluator (the professor) will need to forward to his superior (department Chair, college Dean) all the data supporting the grade, along with the original contract (the syllabus).  The superior will examine the data and the contract and determine whether or not the evaluation was accurate.

That's how it works at the university, and it works similarly in the "real" world, although in the "real" world people don't argue over B's and C's; they argue over promotions and firings, and they don't use Chairs and Deans; they use lawyers.

The Excellent, Dude! Slacker Effect

Another routine problem with the types of subjective evaluations students write is seen in how different groups of students evaluate themselves and each other;  as a remarkably consistent rule, students earning a low course grade tend to inflate self and group evaluations, while students earning A grades (or students in Honors classes) grade themselves and each other much more strictly.

For example, if I ask my students to write self evaluations and to evaluate the other students in their group, the C students normally give themselves and everyone else in the group an A. But, in the same group, the student who is actually earning an A in the class will normally grade herself and the other students with a B or C.

This is worth thinking about.  It suggests that A students may be earning A's in part because they have higher standards and expect more, while students earning a lower grade overinflate their own effort and value.