First off, I should probably explain that title …
Despite their stunning underdog victory to claim the title as the funniest nation in Europe in 2001 (sorry for the repetition, but I still can’t wrap my head around that one), most people who don’t speak German don’t realize that it’s actually possible to make puns in and otherwise have fun with this highly structured language. This blog entry actually deals with teaching evaluations, but instead of using the German adjectival form of teaching (“lehr“), I’ve substituted its homonym (“leer“) meaning empty instead.
(I think you can see already where this piece is going, but forgive for one more paragraph …)
The end result of this might or might not be an actual word in German. The real word certainly is one and my invention could be as well, given that Germanic languages, and German in particular, love to glue together endless numbers of words to make some really interesting and sometimes really long compound nouns. However, I cheated and appended an English “s” to make it plural rather than the proper German “en”, both to make German grammarians cringe (they call it an abomination (albeit in German, mind you), I call it Denglish) and so as to not lose my English-speaking audience completely.
Call it a draw …
… if only so we can get back on track.
As part of its “commitment to teaching excellence” (newly rediscovered in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to pay attention to it again), but probably also in part because they are legally obligated to do so, my University here in Not-Bielefeld has conducted teaching evaluations every semester since I’ve been there. As always, don’t get me wrong: teaching evaluations, despite their highly dubious reputations, can be a good thing like any constructive feedback in general. However, they become a better thing when there are actually some repercussions to them. Not really the case at my University (if not most universities in Germany) for a number of reasons.
- The German salary system
Like everything else in Germany, salaries, especially those for public servants, are highly structured. Moreover, the struture has much more to do with the job description and then with age / experience than with actual performance. Know a person’s job and their level of experience and you can pretty much nail down their gross salary to the penny / Euro cent. An extreme example of this was University professors paid according to the old C salary scale, where their gross salary was determined pretty much entirely by their experience (read age). Yep, all they had to do to get their next pay raise was to age two years until they turned 49, when even that didn’t help anymore. Teaching evaluations? Not a chance …
- The incentive system
After wondering for decades why many profs didn’t do much after reachi
ng 50, the government finally replaced the C salary scale for them with the W scale in 2002. The structure was still there of course (this is Germany remember), but the levels were now performance dependent. Good work = more dosh. Bad work = the same dosh as before. Aging two years = just more wrinkles.
So a step in the right direction, but the teaching evaluations unfortunately never made the bus. (Not even to get thrown under it.) My experience has been that my pay incentives revolved pretty much solely around how much grant money I brought in. The question of how much teaching I’ve done and how good or bad it was was never raised. It was all in my reports, but I never had an ounce of feedback that any of those lines were actually ever read.
But all this, such as it isn’t, is also only for the profs. For all the many other people doing teaching in German universities, and especially those in positions designated specifically for teaching, return to #1 and take your time so you get more age / experience.
- The just plain silliness system
All our teaching evaluations are carried out online and have lots of nice summaries to happily ignore. No, really. I mean how helpful is a naked grade without any explanation of it? And especially when the course is taught by several people who all get lumped together under the same grade? Personally, all I ever paid attention to were any additional comments, which at least provided a smidgeon of useful feedback that I could work with. (Even better was doing a live feedback round with the students where you could actually discuss things.)
Better yet, all this cross-indexed, cross-referenced, cross-eyed information by default goes nowhere. Sure, we teachers get to see it, but that’s it. For the Dean of Studies to see the results, or even the students for that matter, we teachers have to explicitly allow this in the system and are under absolutely no obligation to do so. And for courses with multiple teachers, all of them have to do this, thereby providing an effective veto for any teacher who doesn’t really care or is getting bad evaluations. Or precisely those teachers that the entire process is trying to identify. And all this was true even before all the GDPR-induced mayhem steamrolled its way across Europe in 2018.
So, in the end, we have a system where there’s really no incentive for good teaching and no possible punishment for bad teaching even if it could be recognized in the first place.
But the silliness doesn’t end there, of course …
Now, when I said that all our evaluations are online, what I really mean is that they are now online again. When I first started here in Not-Bielefeld, they were also online. However, the students’ union was afraid that somehow the system wasn’t really anonymous such that the teachers could somehow see who gave them a bad review and then tit-for-tat punish these same people by giving them a bad grade. So, despite numerous assurances from our IT-Department to the contrary, we had to switch to paper-based evaluations and accelerated global deforestation for a number of years.
Never understood the arguments of the students here to be honest. For one thing, what teacher has the time to invest into hacking into a system (let alone the know-how) to find out which student said what and then somehow change the grades that had already been published in the meantime? Any teacher who wants to pull this sort of crap already knows which students they don’t like and vice versa and has had ample chance to crap on those students long before this. For another thing, paper evaluations mean handwriting. Final exams mean handwriting, but with names attached. No great hacking skills needed there …
But, with no big changes to the online system or its security, but presumably some to the leadership of the students’ union, we are now back online again.
This little excurse was also wastefully expensive. Nevermind the obvious printing costs. You see, the offline version of the evaluation was exactly the same as the online version it replaced, just on lots of flattened, single-sided A4 bits of trees. Lots and lots. And, except in the world of admin, paper is usually not a very good way of summarizing anything. So with the help of a special new scanner, special new software, and a special new part-time position to operate both, all the paper evaluations were converted into online versions for us to once again happily ignore.
And now that everything’s back online, the scanner and the software are sitting there unused (or at least my request to use them for a questionnaire study of my own was turned down) and the part-time position has presumably been retained and remodelled to do something equally productive.
And just to add insult to injury …
Normally 50% of all the courses my Faculty offers are selected to be evaluated each semester, meaning that each course is evaluated, on average, every second go round. But for some utterly unknown reason, the Faculty decided to evaluate each and every single course this past semester. Why? For really black-and-white non-proof (see #3 above) that we’ve done a bad job in an impossible situation?
Despite all this, I remain a fan of the entire evaluation system. Such a fan, as a matter of fact, that I actually want to see it extended. Vastly. For instance, why not also start up an analogous “commitment to admin excellence” program together with the associated admin evaluations?
It would, at the very least, give that one person in the part-time position something to do …
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