Alas, the biggest thing you’ll learn from official evaluations is that you usually don’t learn all that much. First of all, the sample is seldom representative — it represents only the views of those who happened to be in class the day you handed out the evaluations. Inevitably, your best students will come down with debilitating senioritis that day, and some of the worst will have just recovered from it. (It’s amazing how the intellectually halt and lame enjoy health and attendance resurgences at the end of the semester!) Only colleges that require all students to fill out evaluations — some impose fines on those who don’t — can be said to be comprehensive.
Even if you get a 100 percent return, however, official evaluations are inherently flawed. Too much of what they purport to evaluate applies quantitative measures to qualitative experiences. I know that many colleagues disagree with me on this score, and some whom I admire greatly have labored hard on creating evaluative tools, but I simply don’t believe it’s possible to quantify how professors have nurtured things such as abstract thought, intellectual maturity, curiosity, elegance of expression, creativity, or zeal for learning.