TEACHSOC: Re: ESPECIALLY FOR JAY AND KATHLEEN..

[Howard, Jay R]

Michael & others,   I am jumping in a bit late to respond to your question.  Kathleen and others have already pretty much beat me to the punch.   I can’t say that I personally have had the same situation where quantitative and qualitative evaluations seem to differ.  Nor have I seen it in my administrative role where I read the evaluations of faculty.  I tend to find that the faculty with higher quantitative scores tend to get more favorable qualitative comments than faculty with low quantitative scores.  I am not aware of any reach that attempts to correlate qualitative and quantitative evaluations.  I wonder if there is greater variation in qualitative comments than in quantitative scores which tend to cluster at the higher end.   Kathleen’s (and others’) comments about how quantitative evaluations are often used in appropriately are also very appropriate here.  I don’t know if you can impact how course evaluations are used by administrators, but it can’t hurt to inform or remind them of what is and isn’t appropriate.\   Jay   From: teachsoc@googlegroups.com [mailto:teachsoc@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Michael Klausner Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 10:24 AM To: teachsoc@googlegroups.com Subject: TEACHSOC: ESPECIALLY FOR JAY AND KATHLEEN..   Greetings:   Anyone should feel free to respond to the following but *especially* Professors Howard and McKinney.   We have both quantitative and qualitative student evaluation forms for students to do. The qualitative ones ask such things as:   What did you especially like about the course and the Professor? What were his/her strengths/weaknesses? How do you think the course could be improved?   Why that is the Qualitative responses are usually much more positive than the quantitiave ones. For example, I first read the qualitative responses from students in my Intro class and based on them thought that the numerical ratings would reflect them. However, while the numerical ratings, in response to questions, were okay they, were not as good as what I expected after reading the qualitative responses.   Administrators here only see the numerical ratings. Thus people who get better qualitative ones are at a disadvantage.   Have any of you had similar experiences?   Thanks.   Michael