ABSTRACT
New instructors commonly receive unflattering evaluations within their first two years of teaching, even if they had previous experience as teaching assistants or visiting faculty at another school. A “bad” evaluation is one where the students score the components of the instructor’s teaching consistently and significantly below the department or college average. For the new instructor, this can be unsettling. While such evaluations need to be taken seriously, their significance should not be overblown. It is an extremely rare occurrence when an instructor’s career has ever been destroyed by a year of lukewarm evaluations. What personnel committees look for is how the instructor responds to such feedback. If the pattern of weak teaching holds over a number of years, that is cause for concern. If the evaluations show steady improvement after a rocky start, that is as it should be. Any instructor, regardless of experience, can receive weak evaluations. I still get the occasional weak evaluation if I try to do something in the classroom that my students are not ready for or if I am so distracted by research or administration that I cannot give the class the attention it deserves. We all want our efforts to be viewed as valuable by our students. Even after tenure, weak evaluations sting.
