Course Evaluations and Their Impact on SCU’s Faculty

Professors grapple with their feedback system’s effectiveness

If you’ve recently taken a class with Dr. Maggie Levantovskaya, an English lecturer at Santa Clara, there’s a good chance she’s had ‘the talk’ with you. ‘The talk’ preempts her distribution of course evaluation forms at the end of each quarter. 

Levantovskaya didn’t always offer this preamble, but after some healthy contemplation, she thought it would be best to give her students some insight into the process before they filled out any form.

“In general, I don’t like to have students do things that they don't understand,” says Levantovskaya. “And I was just wondering, do students know how this instrument is used?”

Course evaluations are used to hire, promote and retain professors at Santa Clara. Though every department prioritizes different criteria, course evaluations are one piece of the puzzle alongside other things in the professor’s portfolio, like research accomplishments and service.  

Levantovskaya started talking to her students about this topic in 2019 by starting an open conversation, she brought in her knowledge and outside research along with asking her students what they knew on the topic as well. 

In response to drastically different understandings of the process she hopes that her students will have more context to how their feedback is being used. She even wrote a Medium piece in 2020 helping other professors to inform their students about the subject. 

“From talking to a lot of different instructors, I've learned that they were really afraid to broach the subject and they didn’t know how to do it. They were afraid that it would turn students against them,” says Levantovskaya. “Honestly, this is a source of vulnerability for us.”

Santa Clara students can be offered up to two course evaluations per class. One is sent to students via email which uses a numerical rating system designed and is administered by the university and is the same for every course. The second is typically handed out in class (now online) and is designed and administered by the academic department.

The numerical evaluations, called Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET), have become a topic of focus in academia in recent years for their racial and gender biases. Research has found that SETs are more correlated to these factors, like gender, rather than someone’s teaching abilities. 

Many people argue the issue with the biases in SETs is that since they’re used in hiring practices, they create a potential barrier for women and Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) professors from getting hired, receiving promotions and securing a livelihood. 

Christelle Sabatier, a senior lecturer in Biology who serves on the subcommittee for Faculty Development in the Faculty Development Associate, is tasked with discussing teaching evaluations and how to properly use them at Santa Clara. She notes that the threat of racial and gender biases through SETs only worsens existing barriers to BIPOC and female professors at Santa Clara.

“Marginalized individuals are having to do more work to be successful at Santa Clara just by virtue of who they are at Santa Clara,” said Sabatier. “Then they’re the ones in general that tend to get dinged on these evaluations, because they're not what some students might expect to see as a source of authority in front of them.”

Additionally, Sabatier worries that instructors who teach course material that causes discomfort, like classes examining racial issues, run the risk of receiving lower SET scores. Sabatier explains that if the course material makes certain students uncomfortable, it poses the threat that students might deflect those feelings by resenting the professor and acting on that resentment through SETs.

“It could take out so many great faculty members,” said Sabatier. 

The weight of the SET scores varies across campus. Lee Panich, a professor and department head of anthropology, explained that they try to temper the role of SETs in their hiring practices.

“We don't put a ton of stock in the numerical ones because there’s a lot of evidence that they don’t necessarily correlate to student learning,” said Panich. “We have questions that are more about trying to get students to think about and reflect on their learning and less about ‘did you like this instructor?’” 

For professors who have worried about their SET average, the anthropology department’s holistic approach might be admirable. Yet, SETs still have the potential to determine someone’s career at Santa Clara as it did for an anonymous source who was denied a promotion.

“The reason given to me by a former Santa Clara Dean was ‘your SETs do not show you to be a master teacher,’” said the anonymous source. “This was after I had been encouraged to go up for promotion by my department and many others.” 

Since the source’s failure to move up in her career was attributed directly to her low SET score, they expressed frustration around rhetoric that minimizes SETs’ power to derail someone’s upward movement at Santa Clara.  

“We teachers have always been told SETs are not the end-all-be-all when it comes to how we are evaluated, but my experience would disagree with that,” said the anonymous source. “Committees who are looking to offer promotions, more job security etc. tend to look at SETs as if they truly measure teaching efficacy. The research consistently calls that assumption into question.”

These conversations aren’t just happening at Santa Clara. Sabatier says that she’s involved with them nationally through larger organizations in the fields of biology and neuroscience, as schools across the country are grappling with how to evaluate teaching, both effectively and equitably. She added that she’s found Santa Clara administrators to be generally receptive to the research and ideas for change. 

With researchers and academics across the country looking for a better way to incorporate student feedback into hiring practices, the conversations around the current system’s impact on Santa Clara’s faculty provides insight on how the status quo is affecting faculty today. Sabatier sees these conversations as providing a path forward for students' voices to be heard in a more balanced weight.   

“We’re at a time where students are really questioning what power they have to deal with ethical issues both in the classroom or outside of it,” said Sabatier. “Unfortunately, I don’t think that these evaluations are the way to leverage that power.”