My students have always given me positive evaluations of my undergraduate and graduate courses. I still teach four courses a year because I love the classroom and believe academic administrators are well served by ongoing connections with students in instructional settings. As a department chair, dean, provost, and vice president, I have found these student evaluations informative as I considered questions about tenure, promotion, and yearly raises for faculty.
These student evaluations are so much a part of our system and have become so routine for our students and faculty that I have seldom questioned their value or necessity. Indeed, one study of 600 liberal arts colleges found that the number of schools asking students to evaluate their instructors had escalated from 29 percent to 86 percent over the course of a decade. But are they really (as Martha Stewart might say) “a good thing?”
I am not as sure as I once was. In recent years, academics and researchers have identified a host of concerns, objections, and questions about student evaluations of faculty, including these:
1. Are students qualified to judge the quality of a professor’s pedagogy and academic expertise? And it is not just a matter of competence. There is a kind of consumer mentality at work when we ask students to provide their anonymous “customer satisfaction” ratings for courses. It may not be in the best interest of faculty or students to assume this right and such a level of competence. These evaluations may have an effect on the faulty-student relationship that is disturbingly negative.
2. Are students evaluating teaching effectiveness—or something else? That might depend on the evaluation instrument, the insight of the student, the personality of the faculty member, the motivation and fairness of the young evaluator, and myriad other variables that make the fundamental validity of the process doubtful.
3. Are faculty rights to academic freedom compromised by the pressures to secure favorable student evaluations? Some faculty critics point out that the power students exercise through the evaluation of courses tends to make teaching a popularity contest resulting in easier assignments, grade inflation, and entertainment values that supersede rigorous academic standards and inhibit faculty freedom to advance controversial or unpopular ideas.
4. Are administrators using student evaluations to intrude on the privacy of the classroom and to manipulate faculty behavior? Heaven forbid! (I say); but the director of the office of educational assessment at one large state university reviewed the research and opined that “if student ratings are to qualify as evidence in support of faculty employment decisions, questions concerning their reliability and validity must be addressed.”
So you see, administrator colleagues, why I have new-found reservations about student evaluations of faculty. Are these a “good thing”? Maybe not. That’s my view—what’s yours? Please share your comments below.
Thomas R. McDaniel, professor of education, is a senior vice president at Converse College.
Excerpted from August 2006, Academic Leader.
This Post Has 3 Comments
Regardless of their "qualifications" or "expertise", students are one of our primary stakeholders. It seems to me that the students' perspective should be sought by all faculty to help continuously improve teaching and learning. As a faculty member, I value all feedback from my students (good or bad).
I believe the problem lies not with the process of obtaining student feedback, but rather with how it is being used by administrators. It should not be a sword used to punish faculty, but rather as a tool that helps us to see ourselves as others see us.
Your essay raises some important questions about using student reactions to evaluate teaching. However, the proper response to these concerns would seem to be to find a better way to evaluate teaching, one in which student reactions are included but are only one of several sources of data and where student reactions are focused on what they do know something about: how the teacher treated them in the classroom and in the course.
After having worked on this topic for a few decades, I put together a set of thoughts last year in a published article. In it I proposed four major criteria of “good teaching” and a different source of information about each criteria. The major criteria/questions and their sources are:
-Did the teacher DESIGN their course well? Course materials
-Did they INTERACT with students well? Student questionnaires
-Did good STUDENT LEARNING happen? Samples of A,C, & F work
-Did the teacher work to IMPROVE? Teacher Self-Report
A link to this article can be found at the following website:http://www.finkconsulting.info/publications.html , under “Evaluating College Teaching.”
As a faculty and administrator, I agree with some of your points but then do i think student evaluation of faculty is a good thing? yes I think it is. Feedback in any form is usually good, depending on how the feedback is given to the faculty. In my case, I always make it a point to discard the "stray" comments of some of the students since some of these comments can be really harsh and cruel. What I do is make a collective report of the feedback and then hand over the same to the faculty members and this has largely helped in making the learning process in the classroom a lot better.
Yes there have been a couple of instances where some critical feedback haven't been taken too well by the faculty which has subsequently resulted in a non-healthy learning environment in the classroom. In such cases I have always made it a point to part ways with the faculty since as teachers and facilitators of learning, we need to be open to learning ourselves. If we are closed to learning from new experiences then what right do we really have to impart learning to our students? As an administrator I feel more comfortable in dealing with faculty who project a little flexibility in their teaching methodologies and who come to the classroom with an open mind since that's what matters the most. Are students capable of judging the competence of a faculty? Not necessarily, but they have enough sense to know whether the faculty is being able to deliver or not. There might be a faculty who is highly competent in terms of knowledge and academic credentials but then if students cannot gain anything out of the teaching methodology of that faculty, then there is absolutely no learning taking place in the classroom and in such cases its not about competence but more about the ability of that faculty to make students learn, which is what I stress on more and this is what is also mostly focused on in the feedback by the students. We have had several instances in the past where students have acknowledged the competence of the faculty but have again not hesitated in pointing out that the faculty is not able to help make them understand better in the classroom.
So is student evaluation of faculty a good thing? From my experience, yes I think it is!