Constructive criticism for the end of the semester

Just in case you're looking for something to write on your course evaluations. Or perhaps you are the instructor and you hope you don't get something like this (especially if you are young!)

Via Texts From Last Night:

I had to do a class evaluation today & the girl beside me didn't fill in any bubbles she just wrote in huge letters RETIRE across the whole sheet

More like this

Do course evaluations have to be a popularity contest? Or can they be useful tools for improving a class? tags: teaching, student evaluations A few days ago, evolgen lamented that his students weren't giving him useful information on their end-of-course evaluations. I'm not surprised. When I…
Regardless of where you work, one of the most nerve-wracking experiences can be your performance evaluations. Why is this nerve-wracking? Because no matter how talented and capable you are, and regardless of how good of a job you actually do, there are factors that you have absolutely no control…
Timothy Burke, my go-to-guy for deep thoughts about academia, had a nice post about student evaluations last week. Not ecvaluations of students, evaluations by students-- those little forms that students fill out at many schools (not Swarthmore, though) giving their opinion of the class in a…
So I'm teaching Psychology 100 this semester for the first time and part of the whole thing is that we're supposed to do certain things to get a graduate teaching certificate (which I think is the schools attempt at giving us grad students some teaching training as opposed to the norm of none).…

I mean, really?? I'm a scientist, and just reading that even made *my* eyes glaze over. If one thing they're trying to convey is the importance and relevance of the scientist's research to GQ readers, what percentage of the readers are really going to walk away with a deeper understanding of what Dr. Jamieson does by reading that description? It would have been a small thing to ask each participant to submit a layman-friendly version of their research (their "elevator talk" description, for example) for GQ to include.

Finally--one of the "scientists" is Dr. Oz. What is he doing in there? One, I would think he's already well-known enough; why not save that spot for another scientist? Two, yes, I know he's actually done research and published, and is on the faculty at Columbia. Fantastic. He's also a serious woo peddler, who has even featured everyone's favorite "alternative" doc, Joseph Mercola, on his talk show, and discussed how vaccines may be playing a role in autism and allergies (despite mounds of evidence to the contrary). This seems to completely contradict their goal of "research funding as a national priority," since Oz is often (and Mercola is always) highly critical of "mainstream medicine." I really don't understand his inclusion, and think it's to the detriment of the rest of the campaign.