"You know, there are two common misconceptions about teaching," he said, "The first one is: We want to improve our teaching evaluation score and earn the Best Teacher Award."
"That's difficult, I know." LS said.
"It is not difficult, but impossible," LY remarked, "How could you ever compare to an energetic and yet highly skillful teacher like JW ? But, the misconception lies here: What good is there to score better in the teaching evaluation ? An improvement from 75- to 95-percentile gives you no benefit - although you have to do a lot more. Yes, an evaluation score of 25-percentile may give you problem when you try to substantiate or ask for a promotion, but, since there are so many horrible teachers - I won't say who - it is equally difficult to score very low!"
We all laughed.
"How about the second misconception?" One of us asked.
"That one is: Doing more teaching would give you a higher evaluation score. Many a time that's quite opposite." LY pointed out.
"Why's that?"
"Because the evaluation is based on students' impression rather than an objective measurement of the amount of time spent or material learnt. The longer you spend with the students, the higher the chance you would offend them - or the higher the chance they would irritate you," my friend continued, "The way to score high in the teaching evaluation is to create an impression that you are an excellent teacher but you are too busy to spend much time with the students. They would just admire you and give you the best score - based on their romantic idea!"
"This tactic sounds familiar. Someone amongst us is making good use of it." One of us said.
"That's XX." My friend concluded triumphantly.
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