I got my first university teaching appointment in 1978. Student feedback was more-hit-or miss affair then. Perhaps relatedly, university tenure was understood to be a tangible thing rather than a vague short-term promise to be broken if economic circumstances dictated a shift in university policy. Informal student feedback had to be dire for action to be taken against offending lecturers. Maybe this was unsatisfactory. However, by the time I retired in the second decade of the 21st century the pendulum had swung considerably.
Teaching sociology to medical students could be hard work, even though it became progressively less ‘dangerous’ over the decades after the 1970s. Nor were our basic medical science colleagues generally sympathetic. I recall one UCL Dean taking great pleasure in relaying to a meeting of colleagues convened to consider student feedback that the most frequent comment made of the sociology teaching by the medical students was ‘too much’. When the tittering died down I explained that of 160 students, three had offered feedback in the form of comments, of which two said ‘too much’ (or words to that effect); so 2 out of 160.
It was during this period that I attempted to put neophyte lecturers at ease by posting on a department noticeboard three evaluative comments made of a single lecture I had recently given. The comments were:
‘He was awesome.’
‘He is a waste of space’.
‘He never turned up’.
So, to be taken with a pinch of salt. As a sociologist in particular you can’t please everybody, especially if it’s your job to invite them to question long-held prejudices about society.
For one subsequent exercise in student evaluation at UCL the designers included a lecture that had never occurred by a lecturer that didn’t exist. I was duly evaluated along with all the others.
Now it’s all metric and I hate to think what’s hidden in the stats!
One of my most satisfying achievements was getting generally good feedback over the years (I always loved teaching undergrads). In my final four or five years I received ‘top teacher’ awards generated by my UCL medical students. It’s a series of evaluations that make me as happy as anything I’ve ever achieved.