Faculty Evaluation

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“Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” 

                            -- Malcolm Forbes

by Chelsea Huang

     Everybody needs to be evaluated, from time to time, no matter who. It is essential for every education institute to have faculty evaluation. The faculty evaluation system exists not only to ensure that the institute provides conducive courses for the students, but also at the same time to help lecturers learn about students’ feedbacks to their course plans. The system intends to be beneficial for every party: the school, the students, and the teachers. However, it was not so in the case of Instructor Flamingo Kuo, who failed his entire class after receiving a slightly negative feedback from one student in the faculty evaluation questionnaire. 
 
     The incident with Kuo caught immediate and immense media attention. It was reported that Kuo, allegedly after learning this feedback of his evaluation, demanded the university to let know the name of the student who described Kuo’s course as “a bit empty”.  After being denied of the student’s name, he posted a screenshot of the anonymous student’s review on his personal Facebook page, and threatened to fail every student in that class.

     The action of Kuo makes people wonder how the evaluation system works. First off, students in Kuo’s university need to finish the questionnaire for faculty evaluation before the computer system shows them their final grades. However, the professors do not need to finish all their marking and grading before they can see the feedbacks from the students. They get to see the feedbacks way before they upload their grades. And this is where such a system goes wrong. It seems only fair when teachers have access to their feedbacks and comments from students only after they upload the grades, i. e., before they can see the feedbacks and comments which might or might not agitate teachers to misjudgments.

     On what ground could Kuo demand the name of the student who gave him a negative remark? Is not the system designed to be anonymous for a reason? Anonymity is necessary for students to feel protected while speaking their mind. With this understanding, Kuo’s demand to know the name of the student sabotages the purpose of this anonymous system, although some may argue that absolute anonymity can leave the evaluated person open to untraceable malicious remarks.

     The current faculty evaluation system can potentially act as a double-edged sword as both students and teachers hold the abilities to jeopardize each other with a hate remark or a hate grade. It is needless to say, there are still room for improvements.