Just finished another frustrating conversation with a faculty member. I had given my own evaluation form to the students for the course I run rather than rely on the online form the college uses. The response rate on the colleges' form has been dismal for a number of years. To me the problem is the number of questions they ask about each instructor. It is not a problem when a very limited number of people teach a course but this course is team taught and has about 18 instructors in total. I know if I were faced with a lengthy form to fill out I would not do it. Anyway, the form I used had 1 as the best and 5 as the worst - one question per instructor with a place for comments. I then gave an average for each instructor. This person was really perturbed that I had not used 5 as the best and 1 as the worst - they would not be able to understand the numbers if 1 were the best. The 1 to 5 had been fine with the leaders of the other two sections of the course. They were also worried about using this number for promotions when the reverse is the school norm - I did not realize until after we stopped talking that all the faculty involved were full professors and promotion was no longer an issue.