The Evaluation

I went to a training course a couple days ago. The course was for basic-level information on a general subject (how’s that for vague?), but I’d been looking forward to it for a few weeks. It was scheduled for four hours, but the instructor said he was in a hurry and we could get through the material in two hours — and we did.

Overall, the course was not as interesting as I had hoped. I was a bit disappointed, but it wasn’t really particularly bad — I did learn a little something. The next day I got an evaluation form for the class.

Your response to the following questions will help us continue to enhance our educational efforts. Provide comments for ratings of 1 or 2.

It was a series of five questions like:

Overall Rating Of This Training Session
Poor 1     |     Fair 2     |     Good 3     |     Outstanding 4

I thought the course, materials, and instructor were just Fair, and I was willing to say so. But the bold note in the evaluation instructions gave me pause. I didn’t have time to write out comments about something I don’t think highly about to begin with. It was something that turned out to not be worth my time to attend, and now their wanting me to spend more time explaining to them why I didn’t consider it above fair?

The class suddenly jumped in quality. I marked “Good 3” for each item and shoved the evaluation form out of my way. Yeah, my doing that is just perpetuating the less than good quality, and I feel a twinge of guilt about letting them get away with it. By setting up the instructions like they did, they’re skewing the results by nudging people to do like I did — answer above what is needed for further effort.

I’ve written evaluation forms, myself, in my career. This is a prime example of how you shouldn’t write such things. If you want an honest answer, don’t force the respondent to put in more effort for certain answers. Of course, this assumes you want an honest answer and not a skewed result. In this case, it might be that the ones asking the question wanted to skew the results higher for their own benefit.

I wonder, was this evaluation form just badly written or intentionally skewed?

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com