Lecturer Teaching Evaluation (LTE) or Penilaian Pengajaran Pensyarah is an online based survey of sorts where students answer a range of questions to evaluate their lecturer’s teaching _______ (ability/effectiveness/kindness/failure/malleability) – fill in the blanks with the appropriate words.
At first glance, you may deduce that I am against this practice; but you could not be more wrong. I like, even support this. I do, however, have my reservations on when it is done and what it is used for. As you can see from the definition (somewhat) I gave above, the purpose of this is unclear.
Let’s discuss this a bit shall we?
For students who do not like work, this is a place to ‘appreciate’ lecturers who give them less work, but not less marks. Word chosen: kindness.
For students who do not like work, but are fast talkers, this is a place to show gratitude to those lecturers they can ‘manipulate’. Word chosen: malleability.
For students who are ‘knowledge-thirsty’, this is a place to thank the lecturers who guide them and point out the lecturers who are too ‘absent’. Word chosen: ability and/or effectiveness.
For students still in their ‘school mentality‘, this is a place to point out that lecturers must guide them through everything (read: spoon feed), with fun classes, fully discussed tutorials and readily available mind maps. Word chosen: effectiveness (sometimes failure).
For students who don’t care, this is a place or an activity they do not care for. They just click the middle choice (3 from a choice of 1-5). If they even take the time to do this at all. Word chosen: _____.
These are but a few examples. We should make it clear to the students (and lecturers) of the purpose of this exercise. But I fear that our students cannot be very objective.
**More in Part 2: What I garnered from the students.
