Ah, student course evaluation time—one of the few moments each year when you can be completely honest about your teachers and tutors because you’re protected by the sweet, sweet shield of anonymity. It’s your chance to tell the truth about how you feel and to help improve classes for future generations.
However, some evaluations are so brutal that they might make you spit out your coffee from laughter and feel bad for the staff whom the comments were addressed to. Adam Rothman, a professor of history at Georgetown University, shared one of his students’ anonymous comments comparing his charisma to a house plant.
He started a viral Twitter thread as other professors and teachers shared their own hilarious experiences with student evaluations. Scroll down and enjoy, dear Pandas. And be sure to share any funny evaluations you’ve written or received in the comments.
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Professor Rothman’s tweet got over 3.4k likes and was reshared nearly 500 times at the time of writing. Bored Panda reached out to Rothman for further comments about the anonymous course evaluation and what it felt like being compared to a house plant.
People are weird: we say that we want truth and honesty, but really, we don’t. We really, really don’t. Few of us would be emotionally resilient enough to listen to other’s unfiltered subjective opinions about us. Now imagine that you have to read through piles of written evaluations from the people you’ve taught for an entire semester and saw nearly every single day. It might turn out that the people who’ve been polite to you all season might secretly despise you.
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Now, if you’re a teacher, tutor, professor, or an ambitious PhD candidate, there are some things you should know before reading your student evaluations. First of all, they’re going to be biased. Don’t expect scientific or moral objectivism or any sort of fairness—they’re gonna be personal and they’re gonna hurt.
This leads us to the second point—don’t take any of the comments personally. Be professional. Keep cool. Absorb what’s useful. Discard what’s useless. Improve accordingly. But whatever you do, don’t obsess about the comments and don’t read them over and over and over again.
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Associate Professor of Education at Colorado College Manya Whitaker writes that course evaluations aren’t reliable or relevant but continue to be used in nearly every scholarly institution.
She also suggests that teachers and professors keep in mind that students tend to give lower ratings to required courses as compared to electives. So it’s important to read anonymous evaluations with one eye on the context. And that might make any comparisons between you and house plants sting a bit less.
Here’s how some people reacted to the evaluations. Some even shared their own experiences!
As a student with a work study job in the Anthropology department, it was my job at the end of each course to enter student evaluations into our computer for reporting (before they automated everything.) Some of the evaluations were harsh. But I actually told a professor, in person, that I knew he had no problem putting his kids to sleep at night..he just had to read to them. He took offense until I explained to him that it wasn't that the content was boring. I said that he could be relaying the most exciting news ever, but that his voice was so calming and soothing that you just wanted to curl up on your desk and take a nap. He smiled. I told him he'd make a great hostage negotiator. Then he laughed.
I'm one of the few people that submit these (as a university student). And I always write down notes during the semester (positive and negative) whenever something comes up that I'd like the teacher to know but don't have the courage to tell them to their face. It's a great opportunity to do that. For example - I applauded a professor who came to give a lecture even though he had a prolapsed disk in his spine and had to wear a brace and even with that shouldn't have come. It happened on the very first lesson and if I had not written that down I would have forgotten and I'm really glad I didn't. And I try my best to be fair...I personally really don't like one of my current lecturers. But is he a good teacher? Hell yeah.
In my early years of teaching I received a very valuable comment, moderated with humor. "If Professor A. talks any faster she's going to light her own tongue on fire." I always mention it in my first lecture of any new course, and tell the students not to be shy. I know I speak quickly when I'm excited. Fortunately I've had the privilege of being excited by teaching about new advances in archaeology for over 40 years.
There are so many fascinating things in this world and then you get textbooks that make the most interesting subjects the most boring things in the world and occasionally a professor that could suck the fun out of a roller coaster. History, for example is fascinating, until they focus on memorizing every single date of every single event in history. Just teach the order in which things happened and test on that. At no point in your life are you going to need to have those dates memorized unless you're litterally going to be a history professor, archeologist or the like.
its because giant survey classes have too much material to cover and because of the focus on standardized testing. upper level courses are not about dates but about processes that drive history.
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I once had a student mark me down because the class was too early. That was one of my favorites.
It is important to be able to deliver lessons well so they students will stay focused. I've been teaching for over 20 years and know full well that I'm not going to get anywhere if the students are getting bored. Educating them is my job and I have a responsibility to do it well. If you are not even aware of your own presence, then you're probably not in the right job.
Glad to see students can write their heart out on teachers' evaluation. Also, its nice that teachers are taking it lightly rather than feeling depressed or hurt or vengeful.
Given that tenure decisions and raises are made based on student evals, there is a reason people ( particularly women and POCs who tend to get lower evals) take it personally.
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From a Physical Chemistry lab during a semester that started about 3 days after I had major sinus surgery, "She was a great teacher, even if she was on drugs most of the time!" I'm exceptionally proud of that one. And anyone who tells you that demerol and bomb calorimetry with compressed O2 don't mix is just anti-fun.
The sexy ears comment was my favourite. What does an ear that the whole class thinks is sexy look like?
For one thing, a sexy ear is compact. Nice curve to it, but doesn't overdo it. My husband's ears were really sexy, but ears grow longer as we grow older. He passed them on to his oldest grandson, whose ears are to die for.
Load More Replies...
I teach 8th grade Language Arts. If they never liked reading or writing, they automatically hate me. Also, often I see my former students later and they will say they want back in my class ... because 9th grade is mysteriously making them read and write too.
One of the comments I got in one of the first classes I taught was "This professor doesn't accept wrong answers!" Right you are! (Just to be clear. That was an introduction to statistics. There is actually such a thing as right or wrong. I enjoy discussing subjects without a clear right or wrong answer with my students :) But I still try to figure out how a can tell people they are wrong without hurting their feelings... I tend to suggest to think about it again...)
I had a semester in Learning class where one student said "talks about herself too much in the examples" and another one said "I love her personal examples, great real-world application". Do I change my examples or not? (I did not, but I did add extras)
Potato/poTAHto. I enjoyed most of my profs in college. Some were d***s, to be sure, but come on - look what they do for a living. I wore "office casual" type attire to half of my classes, including glasses - which at the time I didn't need - and the usual college student uniform of Levi's, tee shirts and sneakers to the others. I got a low A average overall, but guess in which classes the profs treated me with more respect?
After 26 years...most of the descriptive material is on 'rate my professors' as the biggest whiners dropped my classes earlier than the evaluation date. Generally, the complaints were on my grading of their grammar in written assignments...and I never had any standardized examinations. "Why grade like an English teacher, it's not English" was the most common refrain. I regret nothing. -Dr M, retired prof
The one complaining about her foreign professor's "messy written english" is a dumpster fire. I read her post 3x and couldn't understand it.
This is a common prejudice particularly against East and South Asian teachers
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I once wrote, "This class bored me to dea" and then I drew a line that ran down the page like I had died while writing it. I think the teacher just tossed it in the trash.
I guess Greg Palermo could have bounced a piece of chalk (or something of greater mass) off the complainant's noggin as an example.
Instead of dismissing the criticism as "funny", teachers should think of ways to make their courses more interesting for students. Even the derivation of the impulse on an object changing momentum can be explained otherwise than with the dull voice of a zombie.
Most decent teachers do try to make lessons interesting but you are often limited by the course. Cramming say 4,000 years of history into a semester ( looking at you World Civ) means that you have to lecture a lot and make generalizations. The classes also tend to be lecture halls of 180 students or more. So teachers do the best they can.
Load More Replies... As a student with a work study job in the Anthropology department, it was my job at the end of each course to enter student evaluations into our computer for reporting (before they automated everything.) Some of the evaluations were harsh. But I actually told a professor, in person, that I knew he had no problem putting his kids to sleep at night..he just had to read to them. He took offense until I explained to him that it wasn't that the content was boring. I said that he could be relaying the most exciting news ever, but that his voice was so calming and soothing that you just wanted to curl up on your desk and take a nap. He smiled. I told him he'd make a great hostage negotiator. Then he laughed.
I'm one of the few people that submit these (as a university student). And I always write down notes during the semester (positive and negative) whenever something comes up that I'd like the teacher to know but don't have the courage to tell them to their face. It's a great opportunity to do that. For example - I applauded a professor who came to give a lecture even though he had a prolapsed disk in his spine and had to wear a brace and even with that shouldn't have come. It happened on the very first lesson and if I had not written that down I would have forgotten and I'm really glad I didn't. And I try my best to be fair...I personally really don't like one of my current lecturers. But is he a good teacher? Hell yeah.
In my early years of teaching I received a very valuable comment, moderated with humor. "If Professor A. talks any faster she's going to light her own tongue on fire." I always mention it in my first lecture of any new course, and tell the students not to be shy. I know I speak quickly when I'm excited. Fortunately I've had the privilege of being excited by teaching about new advances in archaeology for over 40 years.
There are so many fascinating things in this world and then you get textbooks that make the most interesting subjects the most boring things in the world and occasionally a professor that could suck the fun out of a roller coaster. History, for example is fascinating, until they focus on memorizing every single date of every single event in history. Just teach the order in which things happened and test on that. At no point in your life are you going to need to have those dates memorized unless you're litterally going to be a history professor, archeologist or the like.
its because giant survey classes have too much material to cover and because of the focus on standardized testing. upper level courses are not about dates but about processes that drive history.
Load More Replies... I once had a student mark me down because the class was too early. That was one of my favorites.
It is important to be able to deliver lessons well so they students will stay focused. I've been teaching for over 20 years and know full well that I'm not going to get anywhere if the students are getting bored. Educating them is my job and I have a responsibility to do it well. If you are not even aware of your own presence, then you're probably not in the right job.
Glad to see students can write their heart out on teachers' evaluation. Also, its nice that teachers are taking it lightly rather than feeling depressed or hurt or vengeful.
Given that tenure decisions and raises are made based on student evals, there is a reason people ( particularly women and POCs who tend to get lower evals) take it personally.
Load More Replies... From a Physical Chemistry lab during a semester that started about 3 days after I had major sinus surgery, "She was a great teacher, even if she was on drugs most of the time!" I'm exceptionally proud of that one. And anyone who tells you that demerol and bomb calorimetry with compressed O2 don't mix is just anti-fun.
The sexy ears comment was my favourite. What does an ear that the whole class thinks is sexy look like?
For one thing, a sexy ear is compact. Nice curve to it, but doesn't overdo it. My husband's ears were really sexy, but ears grow longer as we grow older. He passed them on to his oldest grandson, whose ears are to die for.
Load More Replies... I teach 8th grade Language Arts. If they never liked reading or writing, they automatically hate me. Also, often I see my former students later and they will say they want back in my class ... because 9th grade is mysteriously making them read and write too.
One of the comments I got in one of the first classes I taught was "This professor doesn't accept wrong answers!" Right you are! (Just to be clear. That was an introduction to statistics. There is actually such a thing as right or wrong. I enjoy discussing subjects without a clear right or wrong answer with my students :) But I still try to figure out how a can tell people they are wrong without hurting their feelings... I tend to suggest to think about it again...)
I had a semester in Learning class where one student said "talks about herself too much in the examples" and another one said "I love her personal examples, great real-world application". Do I change my examples or not? (I did not, but I did add extras)
Potato/poTAHto. I enjoyed most of my profs in college. Some were d***s, to be sure, but come on - look what they do for a living. I wore "office casual" type attire to half of my classes, including glasses - which at the time I didn't need - and the usual college student uniform of Levi's, tee shirts and sneakers to the others. I got a low A average overall, but guess in which classes the profs treated me with more respect?
After 26 years...most of the descriptive material is on 'rate my professors' as the biggest whiners dropped my classes earlier than the evaluation date. Generally, the complaints were on my grading of their grammar in written assignments...and I never had any standardized examinations. "Why grade like an English teacher, it's not English" was the most common refrain. I regret nothing. -Dr M, retired prof
The one complaining about her foreign professor's "messy written english" is a dumpster fire. I read her post 3x and couldn't understand it.
This is a common prejudice particularly against East and South Asian teachers
Load More Replies... I once wrote, "This class bored me to dea" and then I drew a line that ran down the page like I had died while writing it. I think the teacher just tossed it in the trash.
I guess Greg Palermo could have bounced a piece of chalk (or something of greater mass) off the complainant's noggin as an example.
Instead of dismissing the criticism as "funny", teachers should think of ways to make their courses more interesting for students. Even the derivation of the impulse on an object changing momentum can be explained otherwise than with the dull voice of a zombie.
Most decent teachers do try to make lessons interesting but you are often limited by the course. Cramming say 4,000 years of history into a semester ( looking at you World Civ) means that you have to lecture a lot and make generalizations. The classes also tend to be lecture halls of 180 students or more. So teachers do the best they can.
Load More Replies... 
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