SRI: Silly Revolting Indigestion? Spoiled Repugnant Insanity?

No.

Student Rating of Instruction. Spring Edition. 2012. Now coming to a university department near you. Watch as adjuncts, instructors, and tenure-track faculty squirm on theoretical stakes as students skewer them for various reasons real or imagined. Witness as administrators and supervisors carefully consider what students have to say as they weigh the professional fates of us feckless folk and determine whether, based on what students have to say, we should be reappointed for another year.

Have I dripped enough sarcasm into my introduction to sufficiently convey how horrifying these little written barbs are? The SRI…the bane of my (and fellow instructor and tenure-track faculty’s) existence. Why? Because our department heads, deans, and provosts actually take into consideration the OPINIONS of 18-20 year olds in determining our overall effectiveness, knowledge, and clarity as professors.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually value student input. I actively request it every semester in every class that I teach – but I expect my students to provide substantive feedback about what they learned, what they would change about the class, and an explanation or argument as to WHY something should change. I’ve used this valuable feedback to make changes…every semester. So why, might you ask, am I being so hard on the SRI? Simple. It is ANONYMOUS. Which makes it the equivalent of Rate My Professors where there are zero consequences for lambasting a professor because the student decides that it is the professor’s fault that he or she didn’t do well – that the professor wasn’t clear, knowledgeable, and available…not that the student wasn’t prepared, procrastinated all semester, didn’t listen or pay attention in class, and never asked a single question. In other words, the SRI encourages vengeance and utterly lacks any accountability.

SRIs are used to evaluate our overall performance as instructors by people who do not yet have college degrees, who do not have the knowledge that we do about writing, college level instruction, or rhetoric, who think (generally) that Facebook and Twitter are as worthy of their attention as their college coursework (even IN class), and who skip class because it is raining…or snowing…or windy…or sunny…or or or or or….and think that those are viable excuses for missing class. These SRIs make me distinctly uncomfortable and on edge every semester…and I know that I’m not alone in that feeling. The power that the students have over us is monumental and scary – they can literally make or break our careers, depending on how heavily weighted the department or university tenure committee decide to make the SRI.

I cannot force my students to listen. I cannot force my students to grant me more attention in class than they grant their texts and emails on their phones. I cannot force my students to begin assignments early, work diligently on them, and turn them in on time. But they can force my department head to note that I’m not clear enough, or give assignments that are too hard or weighted too heavily, or that I don’t turn graded work back fast enough. On this last one, I admit to taking up to two weeks to grade and return work, which I always figured was ample time, given all of the other responsibilities that I must attend to. If ALL I did was teach and grade, then the work would likely be returned within two class periods. But that’s not the reality of my job or my life. Sometimes I don’t work on weekends. And sometimes I don’t work until 10pm. So what do I do? Ignore my other responsibilities in favor of fast grading? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

These SRIs are the equivalent of your interns evaluating YOUR overall effectiveness as a boss and influencing your continued employment…can you imagine? Most people who work outside of academia who learn this (when I tell them) are floored and disgusted by this idea. Indeed. As are we.

But.

As students are now considered “consumers” of education and we are evidently cogs in the education delivery business, my job is to give the consumers what they want…easy, simple, and numerous assignments that spread the overall grade weights widely so that no one assignment carries a heavier load, a low amount of reading and writing, and an easy path to an A. Or at least that’s how these SRIs make me feel…they devalue what I do by allowing individuals who are distinctly unqualified to comment on my performance and to judge my effectiveness based solely on opinion and whether they like me or not.

You’d think that I have terrible SRIs, right? I don’t. My evals are usually pretty good, but if I try anything different, anything truly innovative, anything that goes outside the expected norm? I suffer with poor SRI ratings.

This contentious document makes it IMPOSSIBLE for me to bring my creativity, innovation, new ideas, and adventurous spirit to the crafting of composition classes. Why is that important, you might wonder? Well, being creative and innovative in a composition class actually helps the students who are paying attention and doing the work a whole lot more than a traditional, standard, expected, taught-from-a-textbook approach that gives purposeless, audience-less five-paragraph essay assignments. But that’s a gripe for another day.

If you are a professor or instructor in a similar position, how do you work to guarantee good student responses to the SRI (“excellent” and “good” ratings)? Do you explain things every single day (redundancies atop redundancies)? Do you give quizzes on what you explained? Do you provide pizza and cookies once a month? Do you start everyone at an A and give them ten assignments worth 10% each and make it almost impossible for them to fail or do poorly regardless of their level of engagement?

Any advice or ideas will be greatly appreciated, both for me and anyone who suffers the same heartburn every semester. Let the games begin.

Edit: This article just arrived in my university mailbox, forwarded by a fellow faculty member to all faculty. Given the content of my post, this is highly relevant. Note especially the VAST differences in the definition of an "effective teacher" between students and faculty.