Why Not Teacher Evaluations by Students?

[mike_c]

34. agreed 100 percent....

I teach university classes where student evaluations have long been a staple of faculty retention, tenure, and promotion decisions. In my university-- the California State University-- a great deal of attention is paid to student evaluations of faculty. There is little or no attempt to measure the quality of those evaluations, however. Indeed, since they are anonymous, there is arguably no way at all to determine their quality.

In a class of 100 students, I routinely get horribly, shockingly low evaluations and giddily high evaluations in the same course, with most falling somewhere in between. When we went to electronic online evaluations several years ago, the good evals mostly disappeared, suggesting that the only folks motivated to make time for class evaluations outside of class were those who were pissed off. This self sampling further degrades the quality of student evaluations.

The more challenging a class is, the more likely it is to receive poor student evaluations. Modern pedagogical approaches are more likely to receive low marks, despite being demonstrably more effective even in the classes that are ranking them poorly, simply because students distrust new classroom techniques. Early classes are more likely to be poorly rated, as are courses that feature in-class problem solving or other work. These are just my personal experiences, but colleagues report similar experiences. "Good" lectures, which mimic television entertainment, are not too challenging, and require little student engagement during class routinely fare better at evaluation time, despite being shown repeatedly to be among the weakest means of teaching.

Further, I'd argue that the students are uniquely NOT qualified to evaluate their professors, both because they tend to evaluate from an emotional perspective rather than a rational or informed one, and also because the merit and utility of ANY class is often not apparent to students until years later, and might have little to do with the course content that was actually taught during the semester. Students rarely have the career perspective or the discipline knowledge to evaluate the quality of a course. In the end, it often comes down to two questions: did they like the professor personally, and was the course easy enough to not make them feel uncomfortably challenged?

The IDEA of student evaluations is appealing-- as someone noted way up thread, students are the proximal "clients" in education. But this ignores the reality that, proximal "customers" or not, students are rarely qualified to evaluate the courses they're offered and besides, the customer/provider model is not at all appropriate for education. In education, the "product" we provide is opportunity to learn in a structured environment. That's it, pretty much. And yet, course evaluations NEVER include questions like "Did the instructor provide opportunities to learn?" Never.