Teaching Evals

My university normally doesn't do evals until the end of the term. However, in order to get an idea of how I am doing, and have a chance to change things that aren't going well, I gave my students a short mid-term eval.

The results were good and bad. They were below my expectations, but then I have pretty high expectations. My overall rating was somewhere between a 3-4 (out of 5). I was criticized a lot for organization, which is ironic because I am one of the best organized people on the planet, but I know exactly what they are talking about. To try and make the subject more relevant to my students (the text is pretty outdated as are all of them in my field), I have been writing example problems from lots of newer subdivisions of my field. The disadvantage of that is that I am using unvetted problems, and on occasion there are errors or the questions are poorly worded. I don't want to give them the same boring material that has been studied for the last 20 years, but new material implies the possibility of mistakes.

Also, I had tried as much as possible to emulate the professor for the previous class, especially since mine is a continuation of his course. In the process, I misinterpreted his syllabus a little bit. He said 1/2 the HWs were group and 1/2 were individual. I assumed this met that 1 week it was individual and 1 week group. Turns out it meant that 1/2 the problems each week were individual and 1/2 were group. Nobody bothered to tell me this until this eval. So in a way I am glad I asked, but I'm also thinking why didn't anybody say anything?

The final point is that they think the HWs are too long. I think everyone in every class probably thinks the HWs are too long. The thing is I think the previous prof might have been a little soft on them. The number of HW problems that I am assigning is consistent with the prof who taught my class previously, and is exactly the same as the problems that I was assigned when I took the course (Did I mention that it hasn't changed in 20 years?) In addition to all that, each course will get successively worse. So if I am soft on them now, they will feel hit by a mack truck in the next course. I am reluctant to reduce the HWs, but I am not sure how to address their concerns. How can I convince them that this is a good thing?

The good news is that I have a couple days to ruminate on all this before the next class. So, we will have a talk about everything and I will try to make adjustments. Hopefully by the end of the term. I will be getting all 5s on my evals.