All you school people.....do you have to do teacher evaluations? I do. The profs claim importance. Take it seriously, they say. We really look at this stuff, they say. It makes a difference. Think about it. One professor I had last semester went so far as to ask us to be charitable on the evaluations, seeing as she was up for tenure soon.

Are they to be believed? Or is my TA today to be believed. We did the evaluations. I don't care, he said. Write whatever the hell you want about me, they don't look at those things anyways.

I tend to think that it is in fact, the latter case which is true. I've been in university for four years now. I've taken dozens of classes. I've written dozens of evaluations. And I rarely make evaluations that reinforce the status quo. If I don't really have much to say about the course, I don't fill in all the checkboxes in the middle row. I just don't bother handing it in at all. No, the ones I hand in have real opinions in them. Some good some bad. I often give suggestions, particularly about the course itself. I have never seen a whit of difference effected because of my comments. And I'm not even necessarily talking about my own individual ones here. There are certain profs who are universally reviled. Hated intensely among their students, without exception. Well, very few exceptions anyways. The entire class will evaluate them very poorly. But nothing really comes of it. Is such a person ever fired? No. Do they not get offered to teach that class again? No. Does their style of teaching change? No. It's as if those evaluations were never written. It's a pointless exercise. Similarly, if good evaluations were written.....I've never seen anybody promoted because of a good evaluation that I've given them. All this makes me truly wonder. Are they are taking these so called evaluations and just chucking them in the incinerator?

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