student evaluations

phrases from student feedback

What happens when student feedback is racist

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Each semester, university staff receive anonymous student evaluations. These surveys are framed as neutral tools to support teaching staff’s ongoing reflection and improvement. On paper, they’re positioned to provide structured and constructive feedback to teaching staff, in a space that is intended to be safe for students (from academic recourse).

But what about the safety of the educators receiving them?  

As two Aboriginal women teaching in Critical Indigenous Studies, we know this question too well. The system of anonymous feedback, as it currently stands, can be a site of unfiltered racialised, gendered and deeply personal violence. Yet, because it arrives wrapped in bureaucratic language like “reflection” and “improvement”, it’s too often dismissed as just “part of the job”. But at what cost does this violent ‘part of the job’ come?  

Research into the abuse in anonymous feedback surveys has been well documented, with attacks on appearance, particularly amplified for women. These are often received through an impersonal, centralised email, and are often read in isolation.   

As Aboriginal women, we know too well the impact of these student surveys. Semester after semester we must brace ourselves for the things we know that will come. Yet it doesn’t matter how much we brace for it, it is always worse than we can imagine.  

But the truth is, nothing prepares you for seeing anonymous comments regarding Indigenous peoples, our knowledges, and histories, dragged through a system that was never built for or by us. And the comments post-Referendum? They’re louder, more entitled, more emboldened than ever.  

Real comments from anonymous student feedback

These are real comments pulled from anonymous student feedback. We’re told this is about improving teaching practice. As Distinguished Professor Bronwyn Carlson asks “where is the duty of care for us?” as Educators and as people?  

Collation of just some extracts of anonymous student feedback from Session 1 2025  

Student Feedback or a Strategy of the System? 

The intersection of racism, misogyny, and anti-Indigenous sentiment is heightened in these cohorts, particularly when students feel resentment for having to learning Critical Indigenous Studies.  

This is even further amplified when the rise of anti-intellectualism is coupled with right wing media which encourages this disdain and devaluation ofIndigenous peoples, knowledges and perspectives.  

 

This is particularly true when students encounter the idea of unpacking their own proximity to settler colonial systems. For some, it is more comfortable to deflect. They do this by attacking the Indigenous tutors teaching the course, and the discipline itself,  instead of sitting with the discomfort of learning.  

“I don’t like that it was taught by Indigenous people”, “Not properly qualified”, “Her distasteful demeanor” are violent racist, gendered and anti-intellectual critiques of the teacher not the teaching.  This is settler fragility manifesting through institutional structures.  and they remind us how deeply whiteness is protected, even in the name of education. 

Still, We Teach 

But there is a flipside of this unfiltered violence.  There are pockets of so much joy in receiving feedback about the transformative learning experiences students have had. Perhaps hearing you were their favourite teacher. Or your class challenged them in a good way. Or the constructive and clever feedback, or things you may not expect (for example, students do want in person lectures again!).   

But woven through the vitriol are also the words that remind us why we continue to show up.  

Words and comments like these: 

“I found myself constantly thinking of what I had learnt and how I wanted to change myself and the others around me for the better.” 

“At times a confronting unit but I feel that it has changed my world view.”

“This unit should be mandatory for every student, I loved it.” 

We remember those students. The ones who sat in their discomfort, who leaned in rather than recoiled. The ones who stayed back after a class to yarn. The ones who later tell us they switched majors, or took our reading list to their family, had hard conversations, or considered the value and complexity of different worldviews.  

Those comments are few, but they carry a different kind of weight – one that is relational, and moves across time and space. They remind us that teaching isn’t transactional – it is transformative. And transformative teaching and learning does not just impact the world today, but the futures of tomorrow for all people.  

The System Isn’t Broken — It’s Working Perfectly As Designed 

As Distinguished Professor Bronwyn Carlson tells us: “It is time for change, real change”.  

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed; to reinforce whiteness, to privilege student comfort over educator safety, and to silence those of us pushing back against settler colonial norms. 

But we’re still here. Still teaching. Still resisting. 

We’ve seen the strength of Indigenous students who, for the first time, see themselves reflected in the curriculum — not as deficits, not as histories, but as sovereign peoples. 

We’ve watched non-Indigenous students confront their own relations to settler colonial systems. We’ve felt transformational shifts. But this requires tertiary systems that support rather than harm the people doing this work.  

Speaking truth to power: where is our safety? 

We want duty of care extended to all of us.  Not just to students, but also to the Indigenous people, particularly women and gender diverse peoples. We have defied layers of oppression to be standing at the front of the room. 

The student feedback system may never love us. But our communities do. Our students, the ones who are genuinely open to learning, do. And we remain committed to showing up, to voicing our truths, and to teaching with our whole selves. 

Because our presence in these institutions isn’t just resistance. It’s sovereignty. 

Tamika Worrell is from Gamilaroi Country, and has been nurtured by Dharug Ngurra (Country), in Western Sydney. She is a senior lecturer in Critical Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University, researching Indigenous representation in education and Indigenous digital lives, including AI.  

Ash Moorehead a Biripi Worimi woman, now living with/on Dunghutti Country. She is an associate lecturer in the Department of Critical Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University and PhD candidate. Her research explores Indigenous sovereignty at the intersection of Indigenous education and research

What we now know about student evaluations is much more depressing than you thought

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Many in the education sector believe Students Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) evidence a gender bias. There have been decades of research into whether this is the case, however the results are often inconclusive. Although a recent large study at UNSW, relying on over 5000,000 survey results across 7 years, found evidence of bias against teachers identifying as women, and those with non-English speaking backgrounds, other studies have been inconclusive, or found that gender bias does not exist.

This disagreement can sometimes be explained by investigating the research design used in each of the studies more closely. For example, qualitative studies that look beyond the scores achieved by teachers  tend to suggest that gender may lead students to reward different kinds of behaviour in male and female identified teachers, including in my field, political science.

Given this disagreement, our team of researchers decided to undertake a new study which focussed on the comments that students wrote in their evaluations. In our paper, Gendered mundanities: gender bias in student evaluations of teaching in political science, we looked at all the evaluations in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland from 2015 to 2018, and examined the students’ answers to the standard qualitative questions in the SETs. What aspects of this teacher’s approach best helped your learning? What would you have liked this teacher to have done differently?

The University has an internal procedure for removing egregiously offensive comments from the surveys before they are passed on to the staff. This is important, since evidence from other Australian universities shows that some allow these comments to be passed on to staff, having a significant negative impact on their wellbeing and safety at work. The set of data we worked with had 0.15% of comments redacted, a very small proportion.

It is important to note that results of these evaluations in terms of the actual scores were high. They also showed no evidence of gender bias in so far as there was no statistically significant difference in the scores achieved by male and female identified teachers. This enabled us to focus on the question of whether the exact same set of data – showing that both male and female identified teachers achieve similarly high teaching scores – may produce a different result using a qualitative research design. We undertook a qualitative content analysis of the students’ answers to the two open ended questions.

Our first finding was that both male and female identified students evaluated female identified teachers in similar ways, but that male and female identified students evaluated male identified teachers in different ways. This implies that gender is doing some work, because otherwise the results would be similar for both groups of teachers. So we needed to look further to find out what kind of work that was.

We delved more closely into the comments about female identified teachers, and found that the most prominent traits associated with these teachers (who had achieved high numerical scores on the evaluations) were: approachable, questions, discussion, helpful, encouraged, input, time, friendly, ideas and feedback. Both male and female identified students evaluated female identified teachers consistently.  This led to our second finding: that when students comment on what they find most helpful about the teaching they receive, the traits most rewarded in female identified teachers are those related to stereotypically gendered expectations of women. Female-identified teachers were described as helping students’ learning when they were approachable, encouraged questions and discussion, allowed for student input, gave time, were friendly, and gave more feedback out of class time. These activities are time consuming, and emotionally burdensome.

We also delved more closely into the comments about male identified teachers (who had also achieved high numerical scores on the evaluations). There was greater variability in how students evaluated male identified teachers. Male identified students evaluated male identified teachers with a focus on knowledge, knowledgeable, inspiring, excellent, theoretical, passionate and best. Female identified students evaluated male identified teachers with a focus on funny, knows, and fun. Both male and female identified students evaluated male identified teachers based on their enthusiasm, passion and teaching style.  This led to our third finding: that the traits most commonly associated with male-identified teachers are likely to be related to stereotypically gendered masculine expectations. These are traits such as being knowledgeable, theoretical, engaging, and passionate. Notably, exhibiting these traits is unlikely to require additional time beyond normal preparation for teaching, or to constitute additional, burdensome, emotional labour.

Overall, our study showed that analysis of students’ comments can, and does, reveal a gender bias that may be invisible when one focusses solely on the scores achieved. We showed that the ways in which gender bias present can be mundane – we termed them gendered mundanities; harmful expectations of gendered behaviour that are invisible because of their everyday nature. The patterns we identified constituted regular reminders about what behaviour is required from male identified and female identified teachers to be seen by students as good at their teaching role. 

This means that SETs may be rewarding female and male staff for behaviours that conform to gender stereotypes. It also may mean that female and male staff are rewarded for behaviours that have differentiated impacts on the amount of time and energy they have available for other activities, including of course research. 

It is clear that SETs do not only measure the quality of teaching performance. They interact in gendered ways with students’ expectations of their male and female teachers. Universities still need to evaluate teaching performance, but they need to find a range of ways to do so, and be attentive to the gendered mundanities of students’ expectations of their teachers when doing so.

Katharine Gelber is a Professor in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia, and a former ARC Future Fellow (2012-2015). 

Students love to complain about women and people of colour – their teachers. Here’s what happens next.

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Any minute, your university students will get an email with a link. That link leads to one of the most dire tools of university performance, the evaluations of course content  and teaching quality.

These evaluations are meant to provide feedback to enhance course design and teaching methods. However, for several decades research has shown that despite the questions being asked, the factors influencing students’ responses have a minimal amount to do with either the course or teaching quality. 

They are instead shaped by student demographics, prejudice towards the teaching academic, and biases shaped by the classroom and university setting.

Despite the clear flaws underpinning the data student evaluations collect, universities continue to use this data as a measure of an academic’s teaching performance. Evaluation results influence an academic’s likelihood of being hired on a continuing basis for contract and sessional staff, receiving promotions for existing staff, and being fired or managed out during staff restructures.

This is a flawed method of evaluating people and it raises questions of why the sector continues to use student evaluations. But the negative impact is complicated further by the fact that we know evaluations impact on different groups of academics to different degrees. The groups impacted the most are the groups the academy declares to value, hopes to protect, and claims to have an interest in fostering their careers.

I recently completed a study where I reviewed the findings of existing research about student evaluations of courses and teaching. The paper, Sexism, racism, prejudice, and bias: a literature review and synthesis of research surrounding student evaluations of courses and teaching, found that across studies covering more than 1,000,000 student evaluations, it is clear that women are at a disadvantage compared to men.

Different studies suggest the disadvantage can vary in size, and is highly dependent on disciplinary area, student demographics and other factors, but across the board, women are judged more harshly than men. At the extreme, this means women are more likely to fail evaluations than men, and researchers have routinely cited examples of more capable and higher performing women receiving lower scores than their less capable male counterparts. These results predictably mean women fare worse in job applications and promotions, and has been cited as a reason why women are represented less in the professoriate, and fill fewer leadership positions.

The same is true of factors such as race, gender, sexual identity, disability, language and other marginalising characteristics. Studies in different locations across more than two decades of solid research continually find that if an academic is not a white, English speaking, male in the approximately 35-50 year old age group and who students perceive to be able-bodied and heterosexual, this will result in some form of lower evaluation result. The negative repercussions of these results are also cumulative; a woman will receive lower results, and a person with a visible disability will receive lower, so a woman with a visible disability is likely to be treated extra harshly in the evaluations of her course and teaching.

What also cannot be ignored is that as a majority of the existing data originates from large-scale quantitative surveys, repeatedly researchers have noted that the rates of people within the sector who are disabled, identify as LGBTIQA+, people of colour, are refugees or immigrants, or a part of other marginalised groups are so underrepresented in the higher education sector that they do not count as a valid sample size.

At the broadest level, multiple studies showed that evaluation results can be impacted by disciplinary area and assessment type. Several studies have shown that academics in the sciences and associated fields receive lower evaluation results than their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences. Similarly, it has been noted that academics whose courses use essays and presentations for assessment fare better than those who rely on exams.

Institutional factors that have nothing to do with the class, or the academic teaching the class, have also been cited as reasons an academic will receive a lower evaluation score. Lower results can be given because of the class scheduling, class location, classroom design, class cleanliness, library facilities, and even the food options available on campus; all factors beyond the control of the academic teaching the class.

Official university responses to why they continue to carry out student evaluations when evaluations are so flawed and prejudiced towards the sector’s most vulnerable groups are rare. Existing studies suggest universities need data about course content, teaching quality, and student satisfaction, and student evaluations are the most cost and time effective method of gaining this information. In the past, perhaps the lack of data around evaluations was enough to convince institutions that a method of data collection that was seemingly not perfect was still acceptable due to the data that could be obtained rather quickly and easily. 

Considering what we know in 2021, time and cost effectiveness are not good enough reasons to continue a flawed practice that so blatantly discriminates against the sector’s women and those from marginalised groups.

Dr Troy Heffernan is Lecturer in Leadership at La Trobe University. His research examines higher education administration and policy with a particular focus on investigating the inequities that persist in the sector.