Respond To Eval

Respond to Evaluations

Convert a semester's course evaluations into a defensible teaching-improvement plan. Cluster free-text comments into themes, weight each theme by how many independent students raised it, classify what to do about it, and draft specific changes pointed at the syllabus and deck — so next semester's revision is a checklist, not a vibe.

Posture (echoes /respond-to-referees): one angry comment is not a trend, and a comment you disagree with is a signal to investigate, not a license to ignore or to auto-act. A single student's frustration may be the only one willing to say what twenty felt — frequency weights the theme, it does not gate it. Ground truth here is a process: the plan records why a theme was kept or changed, so the reasoning survives to the next round.

When to use

• End of term, when numeric scores + open-text comments land and you want a revision plan, not a mood.
• Assembling a teaching dossier / tenure file where you must show you acted on feedback.
• Mid-stream (early-semester feedback) to course-correct before the term ends.

Not for: writing the syllabus from scratch (use /syllabus), or reviewing one deck's pedagogy (use /pedagogy-review).

Inputs

• $0 — the evaluation file(s): a CSV/TSV export, .txt/.md of pasted comments, or a .pdf/.docx report.
• $1 (optional) — the prior improvement plan, so this round is a diff (did last term's changes land?).

If extraction fails or a tool is missing, ask for a plain-text export and stop. A scanned or partly scanned PDF extracts with exit 0 and blank pages, so also compare pdfinfo "$0" | grep Pages with the pages that returned text (awk 'BEGIN{RS="\f"} NF{n++} END{print n+0}' "$TMP"); read any blank pages directly with Read, or ask for a text version, and if you go on without them, say which pages were not read. When you are done, delete the extracted copy (rm -rf "$(dirname "$TMP")"): it is a plaintext copy of the document.

Phases

Phase 0: Load evals + prior plan (Pre-Flight)

Read the eval file(s) and the prior plan (if given). Produce a short Pre-Flight block before clustering:

## Pre-Flight Report
**Evals loaded:** N responses (M with free-text), instrument: [name/term]
**Numeric items:** [list each scale item + mean, and the institution/department mean if present]
**Prior plan:** [path, or "none — first round"] — changes promised last term: [bullet list]
**Course artifacts in scope:** [syllabus path] · [deck(s) under Slides/ or Quarto/]

Numbers anchor the read but do not override text: a 4.2/5 with ten "I was lost by week 6" comments is a problem the mean is hiding.

Phase 1: Theme-cluster + weight by frequency

1. Split free-text into atomic comments (one student may raise several themes; one comment may belong to several themes).
2. Cluster into themes (e.g., pacing, problem-set difficulty, grading clarity, real-world relevance, office hours, prerequisite gaps). Name each theme in the instructor's words, not the student's.
3. For each theme record: mention count (distinct students), representative verbatim quote (~25 words, anonymized — strip names/identifying detail), valence (positive / negative / mixed), and numeric corroboration (which scale item, if any, moves with it).
4. Signal vs noise: a theme with < --min-mentions (default 2) distinct students is tagged low-frequency, not dropped — it carries to Phase 2 for a Keep/Investigate call. Frequency weights; it never silences.

Phase 2: Classify + propose changes

Assign each theme exactly one label (the teaching analogue of /respond-to-referees' coverage matrix):

For each Change, write a concrete revision mapped to a target: syllabus §X / Slides/LectureNN.tex slide K / a new worked example / an assessment reweighting — the same point-to-the-location discipline /respond-to-referees uses for "we added X on page Y". For Investigate, name the evidence you'll collect and the decision rule. For Out-of-scope, write the one-sentence rationale you'd stand behind in a dossier.

Disagreement is explicit and reasoned: "Students asked to drop proofs; retained because the course's stated objective is derivation fluency — added two scaffolded worked examples (LectureNN slide K) to ease the on-ramp instead" is a Keep-with-mitigation, not an Out-of-scope dismissal.