I give everyone a perfect score and move on. If I like someone, I give them positive written feedback. If I don't, I just withhold feedback.
My experience as an attending in academics has been:
1. Outstanding scores on ACGME and institutional surveys are the most important part of the residency program.
2. The residents must be kept happy at all costs so that their ACGME and institutional surveys are perfect.
3. The residents have the opportunity to review each individual attending at least annually. If an attending does not get perfect scores, there is a problem with that attending. Less than perfect scores require action to show that "leadership" is doing something to address the problematic faculty member's disruptive behavior.
4. All residents will graduate. There has to be a major, public incident to hold back or fire an underperforming resident. Underperformance will, at worst, lead to a resident not being hired at the institution.
5. If a resident accuses an attending of anything they don't like, regardless of what occurred or the nature of the accusation, the attending will be punished and put under a microscope.
So, my advice to everyone else in academics is to only give positive feedback. Say as little as possible otherwise, because any little innocent thing you say might be taken out of context, reported, and used against you. This does not protect you against things that did not happen, so the best strategy is to make sure that everyone likes you. Gifts to residents can be helpful in this regard.
The benefit of providing responses on a survey to be provided to the resident months later is that the resident will write that they had a good rotation. If the feedback to them is not perfect, they can't later claim that they were mistreated during the rotation. Still, they can always claim mistreatment against an attending in the future once they have a grudge, so I'm not sure that it's worth ever providing less than positive feedback.
As has already been mentioned, I don't think you can generalize this experience. It may be the case where you are, but certainly not everywhere.
At my shop:
There is no reason to give all residents perfect scores. There are no grades in residency -- no MSPE or graphs or anything like that. The best thing you can do for residents is be as honest as you can about their performance. How is anyone supposed to improve if you don't tell them how / where to focus?
Agree that the res survey has become critical. That said, it doesn't need to be perfect -- just good enough that it doesn't attract the evil eye of Sauron / ACGME. But the better it is, the better for everyone. My experience has been that honest evals don't cause lower survey scores -- poor learning environments cause lower survey scores.
Faculty don't have to have perfect scores. We only focus on those faculty with very low / outlier scores for improvement.
It is certainly true that something you say innocently may cause problems. And I guess you could argue that any constructive feedback may be spun as a microaggression. That sounds like a crappy culture problem. A perfect eval of residents won't protect you from claims of mistreatment.
I'm sad for you that your environment is this way. It's not the norm.
The Likert Scale is the most useless system ever. I don't have time to waste with evaluations. Everyone gets a 4-5 and I try to spend as little effort as possible. Nobody cares about these things in reality.
Mostly agree that I'm not a fan of likert scales and that comments are much more helpful. Interestingly, when everyone usually gets 4-5's, it can be telling when a resident is getting 3's. They may see that as "fine" in isolation but when they see their performance compared with peers, that can be helpful. When a resident is struggling, high scoring evals (or no eval at all) because of the reasons on this thread are enormously harmful -- the resident can point to them as evidence that "their performance is fine" and that the low scoring evals are evidence of bias. Although perhaps this logic is circular, getting back to
@Neuronix issues (i.e. being honest on evals can be self-problematic if everyone else is being dishonest with high scores).
But the ACGME requires that we submit Likert scale scores on every resident every 6 months, so we need to collect them on evals (or find some other useless way to pick them). Don't get me started on how pointless the whole ACGME Milestone project is.
They never factor in. Nobody cares whether a resident pats you on the back or tells you you suck. It all falls into the ether of... "Yeah? So?". I mean, sexual misconduct or abuse is certainly different. But a resident thought you were a ball of sunshine or were mean for asking them why didn't know the patient's medications... neat. Nobody cares.
I mean, do you know how hard it is for some physicians to be reprimanded? Like sometimes, it has to be MULTIPLE negligent outcomes and even then, if they generate RVUs, there's a process to retain them. No one gives a sh-t about evaluations. In fact, as to the above, the ONLY time I've seen a physician be reprimanded was due to inappropriate sexual relationships and generally, they were warned multiple times about it but opted to keep doing it as a "F- you" to the point where it was just annoying... and away they go... to be hired somewhere else.
Again, depends upon program culture. I agree that res evals of faculty are relatively low stakes. They don't tend to factor in academic promotion at all (again may be institution dependent), and unless there's incentive tied to them as someone has suggested the only driver is individual faculty interest in being a good educator. But, there is one possible outcome of poor teaching evals if a program is willing to use it -- the PD has authority to remove faculty from resident supervision. In hospital medicine, that might mean being only on the non teaching services. In surgery that might mean being in the OR without resident assistance -- a much bigger problem that's probably unrealistic (from residents missing cases to lack of political will to do this to someone who generates lots of RVU's and might leave). So sadly I mostly agree.
I also have never seen a resident eval of myself, but we get bonuses if they are good. Apparently the residents at my program don't bother to fill them out very often so it is just another way for admin not to give out bonuses.
If this is the case, have you told residents you work with? I expect they feel these evals are useless, so they don't bother. But if they knew that completeing them would help you get a bonus, they might!
