How to compile "Comprehensive summary of teaching evaluations," given long teaching record

Question

A job posting for an assistant professor job at a liberal arts college in the United States requires that I include a "Comprehensive summary of teaching evaluations" with my application.

What exactly is this (or does this mean)?

Do I include summaries from each of my previous 15 semesters of teaching individually? Do I split evaluations up by course? Do I just include the most recent year(s)?

Do I create a new summary combining all evaluations I have ever received?

Some previous courses are just 25 copies of individual responses (sometimes short answer sometimes scale-ratings) and other times they include a summary of that given semester's course. Do I just use the school-generated summaries or do I compile my own?

Do I include just evaluations for courses relevant to the job posting or any course evaluations?

Is this a general type of request, or something that only this school will "define"?

This question is more specific than one that I asked previously here, which hasn't gotten significant response anyway.

Answer 1

Your summary needs to present a full picture of your teaching in a relatively understandable format. The exact format will depend on the type of evaluation information you have and the number of students in the class (which will influence the number of open-ended responses you can reasonably provide).

In my case, I created a summary sheet which included a table of courses taught, semester, and numeric averages. Then, for each course, I included an additional sheet with all of the students' open-ended responses and individual scores. Each student provided 3 numeric scores and one open-ended comment/evaluation, and there were 20 students per class. So this information typically fit on 1-2 pages.

If your standard evaluations are easy to understand quickly, then you might just include them as originally produced. But that usually isn't the case. For me, I reformatted everything and also included a hyperlink to the originals (which I hosted on my academic website). You can also include a statement that originals are available upon request.

In your case, because you have old/irrelevant courses, you might elect not to include full versions of those IF the file is getting unmanagable. But be prepared to explain your exclusion criteria.

If you plan on applying to many jobs where teaching is important, it is worth spending a bit of time to get this in order, as this is a request that many schools of this type will make.