^Students DO write positive or neutral comments. The questionnaire asks what they liked, what they disliked, and what suggestions they have to improve the course. Most had at least some positive thing to say, and some said they didn’t dislike anything and had no suggestions to improve, since they thought it was fine. My tech students tend to have more positive comments, since they are more mature and more engaged with the material. They also have the other tech faculty to compare me to by that time. One semester I got “she’s badass” (a compliment, apparently!).
This spring, the majority of the complaints seem to be on the “read then assign” approach, and the large amount of homework. All the physics dept professors got complaints regarding the amount of homework in their courses. Some students seem to think that a 100-level course is supposed to be “easy”, but the Calculus based intro physics are some of the most difficult for anyone. The Algebra-based physics is much easier, but if your algebra skills are non-existent, you will not think so.
@sylvan8798 , do you know whether the “good” and “bad” instructor review comments are associated with students who come into the course with or without the needed prerequisite knowledge?
Most of the time I cannot tell who makes what comments, although once and awhile they give themselves away.
One unfortunate last year said I was “very lazy” and then proceeded to suggest that I should give them a sheet with all the formulas explaining them at the beginning of the semester. (Shouldn’t he do that himself?). Rather ignoring the fact that it took me all semester to explain all the formulas! Not exactly something I could do in one day. Anyway, from his other comments it was pretty obvious who wrote it.
But most of the comments are pretty generic and you can’t really tell. I do assume that students who are doing well are going to make more positive comments than students who are failing, who sometimes try to take out their frustration on the professor.
Of course that comes back to the department to list the prerequisites for this course properly (and enforce them if there are too many students who register for the course without the prerequisites out of wishful thinking and then fail because of that). Your school cannot be any less selective than open admission community colleges; the latter do list math prerequisites for courses similar to the one you teach, in order to avoid students registering for the course and then being essentially guaranteed to fail due to insufficient math knowledge and skill.
If you counted only students who had sufficient prerequisite math knowledge for your course, would the D/F rate be much lower?
The dirty secret in higher education is that we all have to compete for the same pool of students … and to stay in business, schools may well be letting some of their own academic policies slide. Add to this that the pool of available students is decreasing due to lower birth rates, and is possibly less academically prepared (depending on your views of the current state of public K-12 education). One of the few areas of population growth is among groups that are traditionally underserved educationally, compounding the issue of lack of preparation. One reason I am not in favor of free college is because I see the slippery slope schools are on already as they try to retain and graduate students … I do believe academic standards can suffer in such a scenario … and I feel that free college will lead to even more pressure to make sure everyone “succeeds” (IMHO, this leads to the sort of dumbing down I feel many K-12 districts have fallen victim to).
