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Student Evaluations: A Debate

They’re debating student evaluations at Phi Beta Cons. Excerpts follow, but it’d be worth going over and reading the whole thing.

‘Subjecting the Wise to the Scrutiny of the Unwise’

Studies have shown, I say solemnly, that the young faculty, particularly, who are subjected to course evaluations, tend to raise the grades of their courses to avoid untoward comment,” Mansfield said.

[...] Mansfield added that he thought the evaluations “subjected the wise to the judgment and scrutiny of the unwise.”

... Student evaluation of their teachers really is, for the most part, a counterproductive enterprise. Not only does it have the flaws Mansfield notes, it also allows students to breeze through the Q Guide and pick gut courses by the assessment of its “difficulty” — on a 1 to 5 scale — made by its former students. And, yes, a sad number of Harvard students pick their “Core” (i.e. general education) courses this way. That, and student evaluation only gives weight to the flawed notion that somehow teaching a course is primarily a “learning experience” or, as another professor’s recent exhortation to students has it — *cringe* — a “dialogue.”

Re: ‘Subjecting the Wise . . . ‘

They certainly have flaws, but I have to disagree that student course evaluations are “counterproductive.” It’s sad that some professors give higher grades to get higher ratings in return, and even sadder that some students will go out of their way to take easy classes (because of the wide range of difficulty, college GPAs are as much a measure of course selection as of work quality) — but my college had evaluations, and I often found them quite valuable.

Students comment, for example, on lecturing ability, fairness in grading, reasonableness of workload (I don’t think it’s wrong to avoid professors who intentionally assign more reading than can plausibly take place, just to test your ability to “find the important parts"), usefulness of reading assignments, political indoctrination, etc. And while it’s absurd to put a professor’s learning on the same level as that of his students, I do think student suggestions can improve teaching.

Re: ‘Subjecting the Wise’

A reader, Vivek Rao, writes in: 

I think that student evaluations of faculty should be made available, but we should be wary of their shortcomings. There was a study finding that student evaluations of professor depend in part on the professor’s looks and whether he is an easy grader.

The study is here.

There are a number of methods that have much the same utility as student-review of their professors, but are absent the pitfalls. A number of schools have introduced a peer-review structure for professors; doubtless this is equally or more unpopular with professors, territorial as they are, but the reviews carry the weight of non-specialists who nonetheless understand the expectations of the field. Their criticisms, I imagine, are far more likely to be taken seriously as well, rather than simply appeased by inflating grades.

One Last Thing on Faculty Evals...

Another correspondent, Jeannine McDevitt, writes in with some anecdotal evidence on the grade-inflation-in-the-face-of-student-evaluation (hey, that rhymes!) issue:

I am a tenured faculty member at a small community college. My own institution is very reasonable in interpreting student evaluations.

However, last summer I attended a conference for faculty who had recently received tenure or were soon eligible, and I met a woman who was eligible for tenure at one of my state’s universities. Her student evaluations after her first semester of teaching were very negative, and she was called in before the tenure and promotion committee to warn her that her performance was unacceptable. Her faculty mentor spoke to her privately afterward and asked her about her grading. His advice to her was to give more A’s and B’s so that the students would like her. She was angry, but she decided to try that approach as an experiment the next semester. The result? Much more positive student evaluations, and a commendation from the committee on her “progress” as a teacher.