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Do search committees care how recent a candidate’s teaching evaluations are?

In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks, “Do job search committees care about how old one’s teaching evaluations are? Does it matter if they are not recent?”

I wouldn’t be surprised if it did make a difference, as committee members might wonder why a candidate didn’t include more recent ones. Might the candidate be trying to provide evaluations from years ago that aren’t representative of the kinds of reviews they generally receive? Then again, I don’t know how seriously committees take student evaluations these days given the empirical research on them.

Do any readers have any helpful inside insights to share from the hiring side?

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4 responses to “Do search committees care how recent a candidate’s teaching evaluations are?”

  1. burned

    The short answer is yes. If someone sends in older evaluations (say, from 4 years ago), and none from more recent years despite the fact that they have been teaching, it is a RED flag. I was an external evaluator for a department (in Europe) and I raised a concern about an otherwise strong applicant because of gaps in their teaching portfolio. My concern was not heeded. They now have a colleague that they are unsatisfied with.
    In general, if you send in only old evaluations it looks deceptive … someone will raise the question: Why? And it is just easier to set that applicant aside. Who needs the hassle or the surprise?!

    Reply
  2. Ornaith

    Yes. Anything that would suggest “cherry-picking” evaluations would be an instant red flag in my department. We are well aware of the many serious problems with student evaluations and we’ll take them with a huge pinch of salt, but if it looks like you’re hiding them, we will indeed wonder why. Are students consistently pointing out hostile, dismissive, or egregiously unprofessional behavior in evals? That’s the sort of possibility we’d be thinking about, and it would raise real concerns. If you have some shitty evals, better to discuss them and thus show your ability to reflect on challenges and meet them head-on.

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  3. Tired_Job_Applicant

    I’m currently using evals from 2024 in my teaching portfolio because swapping them out for my evals from spring 2025 is an annoying process and they haven’t significantly changed. Is that a red flag, or is it only a red flag if evals are several years old?

    Reply
  4. William Lee Vanderburgh

    When I was applying, back in the stone age, I saw a recommendation to include recent, representative student comments, and also a table with ALL your teaching evaluation results. If you list a course on your cv, it would seem appropriate for your teaching portfolio to include the summary results of its teaching evals. Probably, the suspicion of cherry-picking would do more harm than one or two less-than-stellar eval scores in an otherwise good record. If you get asked about a bad score in an interview, that’s an opportunity to demonstrate how you thoughtfully used that feedback to improve your teaching.

    The folks reading your teaching portfolio know (or should know!) that teaching evaluations are a blunt instrument at best, that everyone gets bad scores sometimes and it doesn’t mean you are a bad teacher, etc. If you can show a trend of steady improvement, or an overall gestalt that is good, that’s all you need to worry about. (A point many folks seem to not think about is that you *should* be getting the worst evals of your life when you are just starting out.)

    Your teaching statement (and especially your teaching demonstration when you get to that stage) will probably be most important in a job application. Other important considerations (roughly ranked, YMMV) include: Having experience teaching as instructor of record (sine qua non in a lot of places); experience teaching as IOR in the particular AOS/AOC the ad is looking for; experience teaching a population similar to that of the target institution; teaching portfolio and statement; sample teaching materials; good (enough) teaching evals.

    To Tired_: Last year is plenty recent enough.

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