346 Response to Student Evaluations

Student Evaluations- Instructor's Response to Student Comments
Summer 2003

In what ways could the course instructor improve how he teaches the course?

Jekyll and Hyde

As always, it is interesting to read the responses to the instruments and wonder if the students making the comments were in the same course being taught by the same instructor at the same time. This has always been the case during my career, but appears exacerbated at CWU by:

The diversity of the student population, especially with respect to the mixture of traditional and non-traditional students and
The use of distance education technologies to multiple sites which prevents students from experiencing the full range of communications channels among all participants in the course.

Pro Forma Excel Spreadsheets

There are two valid complaints raised about the Excel spreadsheets: they were not always available on a timely manner and they contained errors in the check figures. I accept full responsibility for those problems. But for the record, those spreadsheets take a significant amount of time to prepare and if I did not do it, the students would either

not gain any experience in Excel or
work in Excel with little guidance about worksheet design.

Neither of these outcomes is worth avoiding the "inevitable" problems that come with developing such learning tools for a course that I teach only once a year.

Exam Performance and Scores

The complaints about the exams were focused on the relatively insignificant (2-points each) true-false questions. The more disturbing aspect, at least with respect to the second exam, was that

One question was repeated from the first exam and only 14% of the students received full credit for their answer;
One question was repeated from a tax research exercise and only 36% of the students received full credit for their answer.

Given that students had these answers and this was a take home exam, I am not compelled to even consider curving the scores. In addition, focusing on the exam performance ignores that the exam is part of a learning/grading system. If anything, that system was much too fair.

Sexist

I find the charges levied by two Wenatchee students that I am a sexist to be disturbing and intriguing. They are disturbing because effective and efficient learning/teaching requires a two way communications channel and I can not be an effective educator unless I have students who are not distracted or disturbed by my "mannerisms." Clearly, I need to become more aware of the nature of "acceptable" humor in Central Washington. However, I also need to put in context: These two students constitute 7% of the students enrolled in the course.

The charges are intriguing because my best friends, my closest professional colleagues, and all of my role models were or are female. (As I mentioned in this class, I consider my ex-wife to be my best friend and one of the only people that I trust and respect.) In addition, except at CWU, no one in my twelve years of teaching and seven years of public accounting has ever accused me of being sexist. That includes my accounting students at Michigan Tech who were predominantly female and those at Syracuse University who included some very confident and outspoken female students. In fact, of the students who continue to communicate with me via email, all but one is female.

It also is intriguing that much of my "humor" in class involved two female students (one in Ellensburg and one in Moses Lake) who have strong personalities and never hesitated to express their opinions. Apparently, neither thought it necessary to register concerns about my behavior.