Student Evaluation Of Course, Faculty & Facilities: Fill & Download for Free

There have been a range of studies of student ratings of teachers. Findings have included:Male teachers consistently get higher average ratings from students than female teachers, even when courses are administered identically (e.g. Study says students rate men more highly than women even when they're teaching identical courses)When the gender of teachers is hidden (text-only teaching), male and female teachers who have been randomly assigned male names consistently get higher ratings than teachers randomly assigned female names. (e.g. http://www.utstat.toronto.edu/reid/sta2201s/gender-teaching.pdf)Student ratings of teachers are not related to how much students learn (e.g. Meta-analysis of faculty's teaching effectiveness: Student evaluation of teaching ratings and student learning are not related) but they are related to the grades students get (i.e. students give teachers good ratings when they receive good grades, not when they have learned something).So no, it’s not a particularly good idea.

I remember a sad case, in my former job, where a colleague of mine had to resign in the middle of the semester because he had developed an addiction to prescription pain killers. I attended a committee meeting where students complained that their education had suffered because of his poor teaching. The Dean said “On behalf of the institution, I apologize, but I would also point out that he had the best teaching evaluations of any faculty member.” The leader of the students nodded his head and said “Yes. I was in his class. All those open-book tests were so easy. I got an A, and I told myself I had learned a lot. It was only when I took a more advanced class that I realized I had learned nothing.”Good student evaluations aren’t usually enough to earn a promotion, but bad evaluations can be an obstacle. Also, in some institutions, if a student appeals a grade and the original grade is overturned, that can be seen as a black mark for the instructor - certainly if it happens more than once. That might seem to make good sense, if one trusts that a grade would only be overturned because the instructor had disregarded the rules set out in the syllabus, but if an instructor suspects that a grade appeals process will be lenient with the student, and then that the instructor will be judged to have gone wrong by being too strict, the better course is to avoid going through the appeals process to begin with.Students who get an A will not appeal, and they will usually give good evaluations. But if you give an F, the student might appeal, they might retaliate with a bad evaluation.I think that this is a big problem with the American system of higher education, especially at undergraduate level. There is a lot of pressure on instructors to give students an easy time. Being too strict is much more likely to create problems than being too easy. Really, the only safeguard is the fact that a virtuous instructor would never give an easy A. I, of course, am a virtuous instructor, as are all of my current colleagues. But it is no secret that there is a big problem with grade inflation.There is an alternative - grades could be decided not by the instructor who taught the class, but by a committee, based on written work (and recordings of discussions and presentations, if you want).

Why? Because students - especially at the time they are taking a course with all the pressure they feel to get a grade in a course (sometimes independently of their level of understanding) - are not skilled at academic evaluation.Had I been asked to evaluate my freshman Calculus I professor (six decades ago - long before student evaluations were even a thing) I would not have given him high marks. He was disorganized, did not engage his students at all, was hard, would not even listen to my one question (when I thought I had spotted a logical flaw in the proof he had just presented to our class), and from whom I got a “C”. The four of us from his section that took Calc II the next semester were the top four students in that class. Was his teaching ineffective?But in addition to that, a professor’s value in a university is not just judged by whether that professor’s students think he is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at teaching. Until you are able to evaluate all of that professor’s work and accomplishments in the department and university and to his or her discipline, you are not in a position to determine whether they should be allowed to continue. The real questions are always long term ones: Is that professor a strong contributor to the mission of the university and the department. Are they better because that professor is there.Have I known professors (both as a student and as a member of the senior faculty) that I did not feel were particularly effective in the classroom? Of course. But some of those professors were brilliant when working with advanced students - carrying them much further in the discipline along a research path than I would have been able to do. Some of those professors wrote textbooks that became the standard in that discipline across the entire country - which in turn made it possible for many classes to be taught at a very high level.There is a reason why student evaluations are one of the contributors to a professor’s evaluation - but also that they are just one of the many used to decide the professor’s value to the university.