A few weeks ago I was hustling to my public relations writing class when I was called out into the hallway by a faculty member who asked me if I remembered what I wrote on my teacher evaluation for a fall term class. After a little deliberation, I remembered exactly what I wrote.
I had written a glowing review of the professor, but I included an inside joke in the “other comments” section. The phrase asked for a clown to be sneezed upon, but it also included some profane words.
My words were not written to be negative — they were an inside joke that only the members in the class would understand. Since professors can eventually read evaluations, I thought the professor would have a good laugh remembering the story and the class that produced the words. I soon learned that a few amusing words could cause me great trouble.
The faculty member reminded me that not only does the professor see the evaluations, so do other faculty members and the dean. The faculty member closed our discussion by telling me to be careful of what I write on my evaluations because it could potentially hurt me down the road. I didn’t think much of what was said at the moment since I was already late for class, but since then the advice has brought my mind to a boil.
If students could potentially be hurt by what they write on an evaluation, then why would they be honest or even fill it out at all? For a student who is up for a scholarship that is decided by a group of faculty members, a truthful, yet negative, evaluation of one of his colleagues could be just enough to push the decision to give the award to someone else.
Another scenario is students who take a class at the beginning of their college career and then as upperclass people take a class from a professor who sits on a tenure review board. If your name keeps popping up as the student who gives the bad evaluations, then your treatment in that upper division class could be tainted.
Often, students take more than one class from a single professor during their time in school. An evaluation completed for the first class will be available to the professor by the time they take another class from them. An evaluation with a few harsh criticisms could put you behind the ball the second time around.
The simple way to solve this problem is to make sure they are read blind, without a name attached. Instead of signing the form, a student could give his student identification number. This way, if the name of the student needs to be tracked for any reason, it could be done. The evaluations could also be done anonymously.

The major criticism of this would be that students wouldn’t take the evaluations seriously. This could occur, but the students who are already filling out the evaluations are doing so only because they want to. The students who couldn’t care less just leave.
The purpose of the professor evaluations is valid and warranted, but they are only good if they are truthful. The positive evaluations are just as important as the negative ones, but half of this equation will cease to exist if students are afraid to be honest.