How to submit 'teaching evaluations' for a job application?

Question

Some jobs ask you to submit 'teaching evaluations'. Assuming the school doesn't have any preference for how I submit the materials, my issue is that I literally have hundreds of teaching evaluations - If I just send them all I know no one is going to look through them all, but if I do any sort of condensing I feel as though I will be clearly cherry picking the good comments. Any suggestions for making the most out of these materials in a job application?

Answer 1

I don't think a modicum of cherry-picking is a bad thing in this regard. What you need to send is a set of teaching evaluations that describes what is significant about your teaching -- the

Great teacher!

comments aren't particularly worth it, but the

Dr. X constantly provided clear examples of the material, and it made the difficult topics more concrete.

samples can provide the insight that will be helpful to a hiring committee.

The committee is trying to get a feel for why you are a good teacher (be that the case), and that's why they want the evaluations. I have provided bulleted lists of evaluation comments, but I have also provided a link to all of my comments from multiple classes. The evaluation website at the university where I taught recently actually provided a statistical breakdown of the survey questions on each evaluation topic, so I was able to highlight the statistical takeaways from the surveys.

Answer 2

First, in most cases you have summary pages that give your overall statistics and even compare you to other teachers in the department. By all means, submit those (juts scan them all into a single PDF). Those are not cherry-picking in any way, so that would remove your main concern. Second, on the top of it, sift through the hundreds you have to choose the most meaningful and nice comments and scan 10-15 of them (you shouldn't be shy and afraid to show your best in your application: after all, if you tell me that you always dress as neatly and behave as nicely as you do on your interview day, I'll just laugh). That should be more than enough for any hiring committee member unless he has a strong prejudice against you for some reason.