These evals don't go away. I work in a teaching hospital and every employee from custodian, allied health, resident, fellow, to attending gets evals from peers. The providers also get regularly evaluated by patients as well.
I do agree with kaustikos that people (not just med students) don't always know how to evaluate people or follow the instructions. Our evals explicitly state to focus on the previous year time period and answer based on how people consistently perform, not just comment on one incident. However, the biggest complaint from my colleagues tends to be people nailing them for one specific negative interaction rather than patterns of behavior. People tend to get so hung up on that that they lose sight of all the positive stuff over the previous year.
That said, there is some benefit to these things. You'll always be working on teams and these evals can give you an idea about all of the different ways people interpret things. You'll likely always be evaluated by someone. It can give you better insight on how to read people. When i get something and can't figure out what's behind it, my approach is to talk to one or two people that I trust to be objective and interact with often and ask them what they think might be behind the feedback and if they have suggestions on what to do differently. This has usually worked pretty well for me. It just seems like there are a lot of different ways people can interpret things depending someone's previous experiences or frame of reference. So asking a few different people can be really helpful.
Sometimes the stuff is just goofy or people project their own insecurities onto your actions. When we get done with our work, we're supposed to go and help our coworkers. So I would go to someone and say, "i don't have much going on right now. Need help with anything?" Well my evals had quite a few positive comments about how i was always offering to help. But there was one comment that said i needed to quit offering to help so much and trust that other people can handle their jobs. I talked to our lead, we had an idea who it came from and it was someone with some insecurity issues who had at times seemed offended when i asked if she needed help with anything. The lead thought the comment was kind of dumb and said she'd never seen me offer to help in a way that should bother anyone. She said I probably didn't need to worry about it, but if i wanted to i could try something different with this person. So next time i said, "things have died down over here. If you have any extra work you feel like delegating, let me know." She seemed a lot more comfortable and less defensive with that approach.
If it does get brought to a dean, you can say something to the effect of, "I'd really like to work in improving these areas, so it would be helpful to have some specific examples of what I'm doing that needs improvement."
If you aren't getting more than just a 1-5 rating you could suggest that comments would be a helpful addition to the feedback. Or require it for certain ratings. I just filled out an eval one of our fellows rating certain things 1-5, but if I chose 1, 2 or 5 a mandatory comment box popped up that said "please support your rating with specific examples" That seemed like a great approach. Another one of our residency programs started making comment prompts to get people started on appropriate comments (for attendings evaluating residents and fellows). So giving good feedback is something people struggle with doing well at all levels.
TL;DR
1.) find one or two peope who seem objective and ask for advice
2.) if you have to meet with the dean, say you'd like to improve so specific examples would be helpful to you
3.) see if you can figure out who gave the feedback based on your interactions with them and their body language. ( don't confront them about it, just for your own benefit and to get practice reading people- are they closed off and tense or open and smiling when you do certain things).
4.) hopefully people's skills for giving feedback will improve over time
5.) realize sometimes it is you, sometimes it isn't, and sometimes its just weirdness
6.) strive be someone who gives good and useful feedback to others (don't try to nail someone because they nailed you)
7.) maybe suggest changes to the feedback system to improve usefulness ( so long as it doesnt look like you're trying to shirk responsibility for something)
