1,2...6,7

I love that course evaluations (my school does them online) come out during the reading period, because they make a great study break. They take me about 20 minutes, keep me thinking and writing, and I'd even argue that taking time to reflect on the goals of the course is good preparation for the final. Here at Div School, they are quite extensive, which I don't remember being the case at Undergrad College--except when I had a professor come up for tenure and had to fill out the freaking SATs of course evaluation. Seriously, they had to use the high-volume stapler on that shit.

...Anyhow. These questions ask something like "How well did the professor facilitate class discussion?" and then give you a scale of 1-7, where 1 is supposed to mean "What class discussion?/It was psychological torture" and 7 is "I learned as much from my classmates as from him/It was all Socratic method up in there, all the time", and almost every class is somewhere in the 3-5 range. But I would love to see a distribution curve on student responses, because I almost never use most of the buttons, and suspect that I am not alone in this.


Visual aid:

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
What it’s supposed to mean:	Worst ever.	Quite Bad.	Bad.	OK.	Good enough.	Excellent!	Best ever!
What I think it means:	I would file a formal complaint if I weren’t terrified of this bigoted asshole.	N/A	N/A	N/A	Bad to OK	Good enough.	Excellent to Best Ever!

I am immediately struck by how much this resembles the way that I interpret paper grades:

Visual Aid #2:

	F	D	C	B	B+	A-	A
What it’s supposed to mean:	Inadequate.	Bad.	OK.	Good.	Very good.	Excellent!	Best ever!
What I think it means:	Plagiarist/ Non-sentient life form.	N/A	N/A	Just go home already.	Warning: you’re kind of going off the rails here.	Nice try, kid. Better luck next time.	Great! You should do this as a job!

So maybe what we've got here is a case of course-evaluation inflation. I'd be curious if this happens on other rating scales. Do folks make use of the "middle buttons" in evaluating politicians or TV shows?  For that matter, is this just me and my tendency towards excessive positivity? Are other students out there using the full range? OTOH, I've been known to "round up" in a case where I know my classmates are "rounding down" for the wrong reasons--once, for example, someone straight-up told me that she was giving a female professor "a horrible evaluation" for being "too demanding and aggressive about her ideas." You better bet I gave all 7s and wrote a glowing review of the professor's "high standards", "commitment to student excellence" and "willingness to incorporate expertise from her own research." I did think she was a great professor, but the line between evaluation and polemic was a little blurred.

So what do you think? How do you use evaluations, particularly the quantitative measures?