I poured myself a drink. Powers Rye, neat. Sat down, took a swallow and a deep breath, and opened up my Faculty Course Evaluations (FCEs).
FCEs are the (somewhat) equivalent to your annual 360s that HR forces people to give you at work, except they are filled out by stressed-out students. At the end of the semester, students are given a chance to rate their courses and the faculty teaching them. About a third to half of them bother to do it.
FCEs are used when evaluating faculty for reappointment (which happens ~every 3 years if they aren’t tenured yet, like me) or for promotion (Assitant to Associate to Full professor). It’s especially important for Teaching track faculty and weirdos like me who are Professors of The Practice because teaching is what we’re mainly assessed on.
The ratings are 1-5 and anything over a score of 4 is good. Core classes (aka required classes aka mostly what I teach) generally score lower than electives where the students are usually happier to be there because they’ve chosen the class, not had it chosen for them. There are ratings for the class and for each faculty member teaching it. The questions range from “On average, how many hours per week have you spent on this class?” to “Does the faculty member display respect for all students?” There is also an open space for general comments.
I was also told by those in the know that there will always be a small handful of students who hate you. My results bear this out. Although my scores were overwhelmingly positive, there were at least two students in one of my classes who really disliked me, dinging me in every category. Maybe they hated the class. Or maybe they just loathed me. Who’s to say?
Side note: The FCE survey is sent out before class ends but faculty can’t see the results until after our grades are turned in, so it would be a challenge to retaliate even if you could figure out who said something negative, which would be pretty challenging.
So how did I do? Not too bad for my first time out of the gate, with one area in particular for improvement.
For the most part, I’m at or above the University and my school and department mean. My lowest score was in “Interest in Student Learning” which is fascinating because that’s the thing I care about and enjoy the most. I really love expanding people’s minds with new concepts and helping them think differently and learn about something I think is really important (design). I must not be showing or demonstrating that enough. As I’m teaching this summer, I’m leaning heavily into that. More 1:1 time, more office hours, and more hands-on working with teams. It’s easy during summer when I have 15 students. It’s going to be brutal in the fall when I have 150+. Scaling is tricky.
Maybe it’s my perfectionist nature but because I’m slightly below the University's mean for “Shows respect for all students” makes that another signal I want to look at. That one is tougher because part of my job is not just grading, but giving design critiques—often to people for whom my class is their first design class ever. I try to be as kind as I can when presented with something just astonishingly rough, but sometimes my shit poker face gives me away I’m sure. And I’m working on my remembering and pronunciation of names. My whiskey-addled, ancient brain is really holding me back there. I need to find new strategies for this—like making sure students make and keep their name cards out for a few days.
Some of the free-form comments I got were absolutely hilarious in how dead-on they were at nailing my personality/teaching style but I’m not going to share them publicly for privacy reasons, alas.
Overall, I was pleased with my first FCEs. It gave me some places to focus on, some confidence, and some hope I can become a better teacher because I’d like to improve and crush it as the tech bros say. It would be nice (and help my case to be reappointed/promoted) to win a few teaching awards down the line. But more importantly, I want my students to leave my class feeling like I cared and they learned something valuable—even if they never become designers. I want them to see the world a little broader, a little differently, than before they took the course. All the best classes I took did that. More accurately: all the best teachers I had did that. I want to stand on their shoulders, waving wildly, gesturing to say This Way.