Another brief reflection on the previous semester:
I resumed teaching an intro course on globalization after a five-year hiatus. I decided to compare student evaluations of my teaching in this course to those from 2019.* The table below** shows that my teaching evaluation scores fell off a cliff.
The sample sizes were far too small to have any statistical reliability — 7 respondents out of 24 students in 2019, 10 out of 16 students in 2025 — but the drop still caught my attention. I hadn’t changed much this time around. I again devoted most of classroom time to discussion rather than lecture, and had teams of students create StoryMaps. My use of Perusall was new, but that simply replaced a different type of graded writing assignment. Per student feedback, the course’s level of difficulty was about the same.
My assessment regime, however, was very different, for reasons that I’ve previously discussed. The 2019 class had an average numerical final course grade of 94, equivalent to an A-, while for 2025, it was 80, just a whisker above a C+. My attempt to combat grade inflation worked, and I assume that this tanked my evaluation scores — an assumption that aligns with the published research.
As a tenured professor who has worked in academia for longer than my undergraduate students have been alive, I don’t face any direct career consequences from this. But a lot of faculty aren’t shielded as well as I am.
*I did teach this course in Spring 2020, but campus closed halfway into the semester due to Covid, so I used Spring 2019 instead.
**The evaluation instrument contains many other questions, but they had changed between 2019 and 2025.