Teaching Evaluations

How to Read This Data

Student evaluations of teaching are a limited but meaningful form of evidence. They are limited because they measure student perception rather than student learning, because response rates vary, because evaluation instruments differ across institutions, and because factors like course level, class size, and subject matter difficulty all influence scores in ways that are hard to disentangle from instructor effectiveness. A dean who has spent a career in academic administration knows all of this.

What evaluation data can demonstrate — consistently high scores across different institutions, different course types, different student populations, and different points in a career — is that a teacher has developed genuine, transferable pedagogical skill rather than optimizing for approval in a single context. That is what the record below shows. Three institutions, three different evaluation instruments, twenty-plus years of teaching, and a consistent pattern of scores at or above departmental and institutional averages, including in courses and contexts that typically depress student ratings.

The images on this page present the underlying score distributions. The narrative that follows contextualizes what those scores mean and what they were earned under.

What the Cross-Institutional Pattern Shows

Taken together, the evaluation record across three institutions and more than two decades tells a consistent story: strong, sustained, broadly recognized teaching effectiveness that does not depend on a single favorable context. The scores are highest at UWG, where I taught the most experienced students in the most structured curriculum environment, and somewhat lower at FHSU, where I taught the broadest range of courses over the longest period. That variation is exactly what you would expect from an honest evaluation record, and it is preferable to a suspiciously uniform set of scores that might reflect instrument gaming rather than genuine teaching quality.

radford university student evaluation scores

Radford University — Average 4.35 / 5.0

Radford uses a three-category evaluation instrument that asks students to assess course management, instructor effectiveness, and global affective responses to the course and instructor. Across all categories and all courses taught at Radford since 2021, my average score is 4.35 on a five-point scale — consistently at or above departmental and university averages.

The courses I teach at Radford span a significant range of level and type: American Government at the introductory level, upper-division seminars and content courses including Congress, The Presidency, State and Local Government, and Political Communication, methods and inquiry courses, and the capstone Senior Seminar. Maintaining consistent evaluation scores across that range — from large introductory sections where student engagement is hardest to sustain to demanding capstone experiences where expectations are highest — reflects a pedagogical adaptability that course-specific scores alone cannot capture.

Qualitative responses at Radford consistently reference three themes: availability outside of class, clarity of expectations and grading criteria, and the creation of a learning environment students describe as engaging and supportive. Those themes align directly with the active learning and high-impact practice philosophy described on the Teaching page — students are registering, in their own language, what it feels like to be in a classroom where learning is structured to require genuine participation rather than passive reception.

• Radford University prompts students to respond to three categories of question.

  • 1. Questions about management of the course including relevance of assignments and rigor

  • 2. Questions about the instructor including  clarity of grading criteria and availability for student help

  • 3. Global affective questions about the course and instructor

• I am consistently rated very highly by students, who point to the engaging nature of my teaching, clear communication regarding expectations, and support in and out of class.  I am consistently at or above the departmental and university average for student evaluation scores.

• Qualitative responses regularly reference my availability outside of class, enthusiasm for the course content, and emphasis on providing a learning-focused environment in each of my classes.  

University of West GEorgia 

Average 4.61 / 5.0

UWG's evaluation instrument divides questions into three categories: student self-reflection on their own engagement, discipline-centered questions about content and learning, and instructor-centered questions about course management and faculty responsiveness. The score displayed here excludes student self-reflection responses and focuses on the disciplinary and instructor dimensions — the categories most directly relevant to teaching effectiveness.

My average score at UWG was 4.61 across all courses and semesters — the highest of the three institutions represented here, and a figure that reflects four years of consistent performance across both introductory and advanced courses, in-person and online delivery, and the full range of institutional circumstances that a 2017–2021 tenure at a Georgia public university entailed.

Two specific points in the UWG data are worth noting. The Spring 2018 scores from an introductory American Government general education section were somewhat lower than my other UWG averages — a pattern that is neither surprising nor troubling. Large introductory general education courses consistently produce lower evaluation scores than upper-division major courses across the discipline and across institutions, because students in those courses are less intrinsically motivated, less academically prepared, and less likely to be taught in the active learning formats that work best at upper levels. Even in that context, my lowest individual mean score across all UWG evaluations was a 3.8 — a number that reflects genuine engagement rather than nominal participation.

The Fall 2020 data deserves particular attention. Those evaluations — conducted during a hybrid in-person and online semester as the university reopened from the COVID-19 pandemic — produced scores universally above 4.0 and approaching 5.0 across all categories. Teaching effectively during that semester required constant adaptation: shifting delivery formats mid-course, managing student anxiety alongside content delivery, maintaining the relational investment that active learning depends on in a context where normal relational infrastructure had been disrupted. Being rated highly by students under those conditions reflects a resilience in my teaching practice that normal semester conditions do not test.

Instructor-Centered Student Evaluation Questions

Fort Hays State University — Average 4.20 / 5.0

FHSU's evaluation data spans the longest period represented on this page — fourteen years, from 2003 to 2017 — and reflects the broadest range of course types, delivery formats, and student populations in my teaching record. At FHSU I taught both traditional in-person courses and fully online courses developed specifically for delivery through the university's Virtual College, which enrolled students from across the country rather than primarily from the local residential population.

My average score at FHSU was 4.20 on a five-point scale. That number reflects fourteen years of teaching that included the most difficult courses to sustain high evaluations in: large introductory American Government sections, required undergraduate methods courses, and online courses where the relational infrastructure that supports engagement is hardest to build. The fact that the average is 4.20 across all of that — and that it was sustained over a career stage that included simultaneously holding multiple administrative positions, serving as Faculty Senate President, and completing a significant body of peer-reviewed scholarship — says something meaningful about how seriously I have taken the teaching dimension of my work even when institutional demands created pressure to deprioritize it.

Recognition of teaching quality at FHSU came from multiple student organizations and committees, including the Mortar Board honor society's Top Prof Award, the Honor Society Honoring Our Faculty Award, the Interfraternity and Panhellenic Council's Outstanding Professor Award in two consecutive years, and four consecutive nominations as a finalist for the Pilot Award — FHSU's highest institutional teaching recognition. That pattern of student-generated recognition, sustained over a decade, confirms what the evaluation averages indicate.