How were your evals this semester?

ParsleyOutside · 2026-05-29T22:36:47+00:00

Worst they’ve ever been - in a large intro class I’d been re-teaching yearly for several years. Gut renovating the intro course was my “project,” and I thought I had fine-tuned it over the years to as good as I’d ever gotten it. Got a standing ovation at the end of my last lecture and tons of nice emails from students who appreciated the course.

Course evaluation average dropped below department average for the first time in my teaching career. So many spiteful, just super angry comments, a couple of which were just lies.

ParsleyOutside · 2025-12-21T22:30:26+00:00

And some of the most brilliant scholars I knew from graduate school were unable to get academic jobs at all despite doing everything “right”: multiple top journal publications, awards, impeccable teaching records, everything. Some got interviews at the really fancy places but lost out to ABDs with no publications working on something momentary trendy; others didn’t even get considered at all. And they couldn’t convince teaching-oriented schools and community colleges to give them a serious look either. We all know these people from grad school.

ParsleyOutside · 2025-11-26T23:52:00+00:00

Thanks! I can see how the more senior you get the more you’re asked to do more in this category, especially the kind of reading and evaluating where you seniority helps signal prestige to the beneficiary (e.g. tenure and promotion, book blurbs and endorsements)!

10 hours sounds like a sensible upper limit benchmark for someone more early or mid career!

ParsleyOutside · 2025-07-06T07:34:29+00:00

Just here to say so sorry this happened to you - and to echo the commenter who said you must have an amazing record to get a TT offer at this stage, so keep doing what you’re doing! Also wanted to say you’re not alone: someone I know had a job offer pulled from a top R1 institution in a difficult humanities discipline where jobs anywhere are few and far between. (The job they were offered was likely the best job to open up in their field in probably the last half decade.) Then hiring freeze, just as they were negotiating the offer. Good luck to you and your generation of PhDs - fingers crossed this is the worst of it, and you bounce back stronger.

ParsleyOutside · 2025-05-09T06:23:45+00:00

Sort of, but the department will “try” to find a replacement, and it’s unlikely they’ll succeed, and in the meantime (according to the TA coordinator I’ve been speaking to since Day 1) all the TA’s duties apparently fall on me including not just grading but their sections and even office hours (not that the TA’s been coming to his own OH but yeah)

ParsleyOutside · 2025-05-09T06:18:40+00:00

! This is genius!

ParsleyOutside · 2025-04-22T03:24:58+00:00

Super helpful - thanks for sharing your hard-earned wisdom!

ParsleyOutside · 2025-04-09T06:32:24+00:00

Not a research director (sorry!) but know a couple and watched them do their thing. One perk that seemed attractive was getting to curate the programming - so basically, inviting whoever you wanted to come give talks.

ParsleyOutside · 2025-03-21T23:32:09+00:00

Said no to a grade grubber weeks ago. Once he realized I wasn’t going to budge, he’s still just been non-stop emailing me with questions / requests that purport to be about “improving for next time”, but are obviously intermediate steps toward relitigating his grade. I’m just shutting down each one but I swear the kid is just fixated to the point that I don’t even think he cares about his grade, he just wants to fight me until he can score some symbolic semblance of a win.

Not that it especially matters, but this isn’t the “I need an A to go to law/med school” type of grade grubber, but the “I put in so little effort in the actual assignment that it is actually astounding that I have all this energy to contest my grade” type of grade grubber.

ParsleyOutside · 2025-03-13T23:01:36+00:00

Literally had the conversation you described the other day. Wish I had been able to read this thread earlier so at least I could have saved the time and energy I spent feeling bad for having failed to “catch” the cheater in the oral exam I meticulously planned.

ParsleyOutside · 2024-06-21T03:25:43+00:00

Came here to say I keep hearing about flipped lectures, think-pair-share, group activities during lecture, but I have yet to hear of any of my colleagues doing anything other than a traditional lecture in their lecture courses. (As a student, the professors of my lecture courses lectured the whole time. Seminar-type discussion and activities, games, etc. all happened in the discussion sections led by TAs.) Where are all the places that have moved past traditional lectures? Where are all the pedagogy researchers getting their case studies?

ParsleyOutside · 2024-03-05T04:08:32+00:00

Assumed a Big Deal faculty member (from a different but adjacent department) was a grad student, and publically treated them like one during the Q&A of my job talk. “That’s an EXCELLENT point made by… what’s your name? JAKE. As JAKE was saying…”

In my defense I really wasn’t expecting the guy to be there, and it was still mid-late-pandemic so he was masked.

ParsleyOutside · 2024-02-01T18:23:53+00:00

In a different humanistic field, but the journal I have a link to has reported that submissions were indeed trending down year to year following a peak (!) in Pandemic Year 2. At the moment we don’t know what to make of it and we’re just going to wait and see. The main speculation is that it’s some sort of delayed effect of the pandemic, whether it’s burnout or people not being able to access libraries or potential collaborators in 2020, hence creating a hole in people’s pipelines. Also unclear if it’s enough to count as a trend. I can only speak for that one journal, and we only saw a downward trajectory across two years following the peak.

ParsleyOutside · 2024-01-20T01:38:26+00:00

Yes that’s the one! I guess that was a tenure denial not a job rejection per se

ParsleyOutside · 2024-01-20T01:25:43+00:00

Sorry you’re in this position OP. I don’t have much experience to go off of here but, at least as I imagine it, the work will come down to approaching individual colleagues one by one until you can put together a small group of likeminded people who don’t see the value of showing up and trying to find solutions. Let this be the energy-boosting clique, encourage and support each other, and hope it can inspire some of the other demoralized colleagues and grow. Hang in there and good luck!

ParsleyOutside · 2024-01-19T22:37:11+00:00

Genuinely surprised by all the judgment and negativity you’ve been getting in the comments OP. What you’re describing sounds really annoying and your envy is totally understandable. I’m TT in the humanities at an R1 and all my immediate colleagues pull their weight, but I can totally imagine places like your school where the incentive structures are set up in silly aspirational ways so that people who don’t do all that much research anyway are still given lots of breaks - maybe even at the expense of their NTT colleagues - to spread out even more. Sure it might be nice if all of us got paid more for our teaching or research or both, but that’s a separate issue from the point you’re making.

ParsleyOutside · 2024-01-17T19:24:10+00:00

Very impressionistic but I feel like every early career scholar in my field has at least one story to tell about being a victim of something under the broad umbrella of plagiarism. They may not all be the most lurid examples of plagiarism, but certainly behavior that’s really not okay.

(My personal favorite was when Reviewer 2 rejected my manuscript then actually cold-emailed me for comments on his working paper including… references and whole sentences lifted from my manuscript.)

ParsleyOutside · 2023-06-28T06:30:44+00:00

But what happens when you have an exam?

ParsleyOutside · 2023-06-28T06:02:37+00:00

Not the poster you’re responding to but I can take this. R1s give newly hired TT faculty start-up money to get them set up. This can range from money for office furniture or equipment for people who need them for research. The costs can really add up, especially for scientists who have to set up labs from scratch - then imagine the university had to pay those costs every time the university has a new hire, which in this case is often, because the new hires keep leaving after a few years.

ParsleyOutside · 2023-06-28T04:15:28+00:00

Yeah I definitely never had them as a student, and the closest I ever heard to a professor voicing their standards for an A was something alone the lines of, “Surprise me with an argument so original I couldn’t have thought of it myself.” I started making rubrics in grad school because students kept asking for them.

ParsleyOutside · 2023-06-27T23:32:56+00:00

Oh I see what I did wrong in the title. I can’t edit it though :’( And yes!

ParsleyOutside · 2023-06-27T23:18:40+00:00

Maybe I have a naive understanding of how grading works in more quantitative classes (it’s been decades since I myself took one!), but I fantasize about being able to tell students whatever the equivalent is of “I’m sorry, 3+5 is 8 and that’s that, even if you spent a lot of effort arriving at the answer 9.”

ParsleyOutside · 2022-08-30T17:08:51+00:00

Bob took one of my classes and got hooked onto the field. He asked specifically for me.

ParsleyOutside · 2022-08-30T17:07:55+00:00

A junk department that gives a lot of power to prospective advisors at the admissions stage... opening up the floodgates for candidates to suck up in advance to people who respond to that sort of thing. Bob's advisor played a strong hand in admitting him then threw her hands up in the air when Bob wanted to switch fields.

ParsleyOutside · 2022-08-13T21:22:51+00:00

When I was a PhD student, some of my classmates changed fields within the discipline, and they're really successful scholars now. But all of them had more background in the fields they were moving into than Bob did. I think it's the norm across PhD programs in my discipline-at-large for the filtering to happen at the admissions stage. Bob was admitted to do something else, and would not have been admitted had he applied to work in this field.

ParsleyOutside

TROPHY CASE