Appearance counts...

We've been away awhile for a whole host of reasons, but I am back for a moment to post what has quickly become one of my favorite student comments of all time. By way of a little background, each semester students evaluate the classes they are taking, both for the course in general and for the instructor. Generally, these are useful tools for us professors to see how students feel about the course, things we could improve, things that are done especially well (or poorly), etc.

While useful information, much of this has to be taken with a grain of salt - and some trends always are clear: larger classes tend to be lower rated, the harder the class the lower the rating, the lower the level, the lower the rating, as so on...

Anyway, one of the courses I teach is a large, lower division general biology course, (BIOLOGY II: BIOL 1620), which is co-taught with another professor. When the reviews for this course of ~450 students come back (which they did today), I look over the reviews for the reasons outlined above. The really useful information generally comes not from numerical ratings, but most often from the comments section, where it asks what aspects of the course (1) were especially good and (2) what could be improved...

There are the usual responses that the tests are too difficult or too easy, lectures too fast or too boring, too much material or too little material... Occasionally, there are really useful comments that I take to heart and work hard to change the next time I offer the course. Well, today I received a comment that certainly caught my eye and is one of those I will keep for posterity - it makes my top 5 comment list of all time:


Apparently, appearance counts - fortunately at least I seem to smell OK during lecture...