The end of the semester has any number of regular milestones for teachers, among them the receipt of student evaluations of teaching. Particularly for those who teach large course sections, the anticipated experience of reading evaluations is often bemusement. Frequently, there are significant numbers of student comments on both "sides" of a component of a course, from homework to tests to perceptions of instructor flexibility. Encountering conflicting information induces challenges to the cognition one uses to digest the material. Because evaluations tend to contain such conflicts, the potential for ambivalent reactions to the information is heightened. How such ambivalence arises, and what it might mean for discerning actionable ideas from student evaluations, is a timely concept to ponder as an unusual semester/quarter comes to a close.