Why students evaluations can be the most horrible thing ever

My department has been hit particularly hard with all the science funding cuts (money that has been used towards the war). This means that several research groups lost their grants, leaving their students without jobs. This had a huge impact on TAships, as an unprecedented amount of grad students were requesting positions. Many of them didn't get any sort of funding, and were notified late into the semester. I have friends that had to change advisors to prevent being deported (they would lose their student visas). Others just left the country, leaving housing contracts behind.

The department has announced that the situation next semester will be even worse. And, to decide who will get a TAship, they will take into consideration the student evaluations. The premise is that good TAs should stay, while bad TAs shouldn't.

Are student evaluations a good measure of how good a TA is? The evals have a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being "disagree" or "bad", to 5 being "good" or "agree". The questions are usually in the form of "Was the work load reasonable?"

The statistics in campus say that the average score is 4, and that most scores actually land either in the 5s or 1s. That is, the students evals are very polarized. If you are funny and entertaining, regardless of how good of an educator you are, you get good scores. If you go easy on them, regardless of how valuable the course is to them, you get good scores.

If you end up teaching a class like Physical Science, were all the students have problems with elementary school level math, no matter how hard you try to make them learn something, they had decided a long time ago that the class was too hard, useless and too much work. You get bad scores no matter what, with very little noise to distinguish among good and bad instructors.

It can be very challenging. So, an instructor can decide among several paths. The most extreme ones would be:

1) Teach them Physical Science. Try to remedy their lack of math background by giving them supplemental material. Ask them to work hard in this challenging class to see if they can get something out of it. After all, science is around us all the time.

2) Be "the nice guy". Make it easy. After all, they will never see science in their life.

Guess who will get good evaluations? Guess who would be a better educator? Guess who will get a TAship next semester?

Are students evaluations a bad thing? No. They are a form of feedback, not a very good one. I, personally, don't care too much about the numbers. I think I tend to get pretty high ones mostly due to the fact that I teach a class with excellent students with a solid background, and that I am a dork and they enjoy making fun of me. I don't think the raw scores give me any useful feedback on how good I was as an educator, but they do say how entertaining I was. To fix this, I do ask them to write comments on their evaluation forms. You know, the comments that nobody reads. They tend to be honest, critical and much more meaningful. They are the ones that help me to improve as an instructor. They are the ones that they don't consider when assigning TAships.

I have met so many TAs that were very committed to teaching that now are very scared that the TAships will become a competition based on the eval scores. They are smart enought to understand the game and have decided to take approach (2).
Hi ho.