Should I include written evaluations (from courses I took) in my transcript as part of the job application materials?

Question

I did my undergraduate and graduate degrees at a university that includes course evaluations as part of the transcript. My evaluations from my professors and instructors generally are good to excellent.

I am applying for jobs right now, and some ask for graduate and undergraduate transcripts. I can order two kinds of transcripts, one with evaluations, and one without.

Would it be beneficial for me to include my evaluations with the transcripts in my job applications materials?

It would be attached in the same file as my transcript, not attached as a separate file.

For reference, my undergrad/grad transcripts with grades and records is composed of four pages. The evaluations are an extra 14 pages.

Answer 1

I assume that by course evaluations, this is a narrative faculty evaluation of your performance in a class that you are taking -- and not the case where you are TAing or teaching a course and your students are evaluating you.

You can include it but undergraduate and graduate grades are very peripheral to most academic job applications -- except for entry level and post-docs when we have little else to evaluate you by. Even then, their use is fairly deprecated. You're not going to be taking classes, you're going to be teaching them.

Include them just to be complete.

Answer 2

If your course evaluations range from good to excellent and there is nothing harmful in them, including them can only be helpful.

In the worst (and probably more likely case) people will simply not read the additional 10 pages of transcript. This is, of course, exactly where you would be if you didn't send them in the first place.

A thick application file is not a problem. Just remember that it falls on you to help narrate and explain what you include. For example, if there are a few choice quotes from the evaluations, you might want to call those out in your application front-matter.

Answer 3

It won't make any difference.

No-one outside of HR will look at your transcripts at all, and HR will only look for whatever hard qualifications the job requires: bachelors/masters/PhD, what field it's in, very rarely even that you have specific coursework. It's possible that they will check your GPA if there's some recruitment incentive tied to it.

No-one will read your evaluations. That may feel like a waste, since it took up a good chunk of your life, but your transcript's contents really just don't matter outside academia. It's very important that you have a transcript, but in practice it acts like an especially elaborate version of a diploma.