Much to my surprise, when I came onto campus this morning I found my student evaluations from last fall waiting in my mailbox. As I wrote back in November when the evaluations were distributed, in the past professors don't get the evals until May. Things have been sped up -- perhaps because unlike in the past, no one bothered to type up the written comments. I was simply given all of the evaluations in a manila envelope.

A summary, prepared by the division dean, was attached to the front. Five of my seven classes were evaluated; a total of 211 students participated by turning in evaluations. Students were allowed to rate their profs as"Outstanding","Good","Average","Poor", or"Failing." My ratings (and you'll just have to take my word for it) were

Outstanding: 84%
Good: 15%
Average: 1%
Poor: 0%
Failing: 0%

Now, lest you think I write only to brag, note what else was in my summary: the details of the college and departmental averages for all full-time faculty. The college reports the following ratings for some four hundred professors evaluated campus-wide last fall:

Outstanding: 65%
Good: 28%
Average: 6%
Poor: 1%
Failing: <1%

Clearly, grade inflation works both ways! 93% of the faculty ranks above average. 65% of us are outstanding, which raises an obvious question about what it is that so many of us can be standing out from! What on earth does"average" mean when only 6% of full-time faculty fall into that category?

The evaluations are anonymous and not given to the professors until after the course is over. Clearly, students aren't praising their professors merely in order to curry favor in the hopes of receiving a better grade in return. I know full well Pasadena City College is not uniquely superb; my colleagues who teach on other community college campuses report similar evaluation results. Are our students worried about the fragility of our egos? Are they incapable of distinguishing what is genuinely average, or do they see"average" as a term of vile opprobrium? We can't all be this good, can we?

I do note that the ratings for faculty as a whole have gone up, college-wide. I can't find my 2004 evaluations, but I did dig up my old 1997 evals (which were done right before I was awarded tenure). The summary report that year for the college was as follows:

Outstanding: 56%
Good: 25%
Average: 15%
Poor: 3%
Failing: 1%

Our averageness is declining, and our outstandingness is improving! The Lake Wobegon effect is clearly reciprocal.

Sigh.

Jonathan Dresner - 2/20/2008

I was thinking about this further, and my first real thought with regard to cause would be that it really is the flip side of grade inflation. IF grade inflation is supposed to make students like you more -- and most research suggests that's true in the aggregate -- then evaluations should go up as grades do.

Jonathan Dresner - 2/15/2008

All the schools at which I've been privy to student evaluation data had similar distributions, and it's frequently mentioned in the literature on the questionable validity of evaluations that the high-end cluster magnifies the effect of the disgruntled and critical students. Someone at the AHA mentioned an economist's suggestion that you could improve your scores more by mollifying the disgruntled few than by catering to the largely uncritical majority.