Evaluating Teachers' Performances: Smile :)

The results of students’ evaluation on their lecturers’ teaching performances have been here, right on my PC. I immediately ran a cursory look at my colleagues’ and my own ratings. Well, in general there seems to be a slight increase from the last semester. This is good. Ma Chung lecturers used to be miserable in teaching, but I think they heed to the feedback given thru the Direktorat Penjaminan Mutu and have been making real efforts to make their teaching styles enjoyable and informative.

My scores: 68.7 and 78 for Bahasa Inggris I in Management Study Program, 96 for Translation, and 86 for Grammar I. Good enough, not yet excellent but those figures really made me relieved, contented, and proud.


But whoa, whoa, wait wait . . . .

Something is a bit unsettling here.

Are the high scores from English Department students caused by my closeness to them, or because I have really performed well? Were the students somehow more generous in their rating because they began seeing my lighter side? I do loosen up a bit with these students. I visited some of their Friendster pages, and gave them some light, amusing comments. I cracked jokes more often in the classes. I recount amusing stories. The contents and teaching style, nevertheless, remain the same. I do not make any significant changes in the way I deliver my structured materials.

So, did these students rate me favorably because I really have done a good job of teaching them, or because they simply like me more?

If it were for the latter reason, I should not be very happy with that. That kind of judgment destroys the validity of the measurement that I have been developing with great efforts. If you like the teacher personally, then you’d be urged to score him high almost in every aspect, regardless of his actual teaching performances.

Which explains why my score for the Management class is much lower. The class is big, with 40 students being crammed into a classroom. I snapped in one or two of the sessions because they were too noisy. I never throw jokes or witty comments to them. In fact, I very rarely smile.

Thus, as a result, they may like me less than the English Department students do, and when they hardly like the teacher, they will presumably give me low scores for every teaching component.

Assessment is always an exciting task, and part of the reason is because it is somehow intricate. With suspicion hanging thick in the air, I think the best thing for me to do as Manager of Direktorat Penjaminan Mutu is to assign a very low weight to teaching performance in the whole evaluation scheme of the lecturers.