Do Student Evaluations Help Improve Education?
In today’s Pope Center piece, Professor Robert Weissberg argues that they’re more likely to do the opposite. They tend to promote mediocrity and encourage at least some profs to pander to the students in order to get nice evaluations.
In a course where most of the students are actually there because they want to learn, a professor could certainly benefit from their feedback. On the other hand, where the typical student is disengaged, ill-prepared, and enrolled in college principally to have fun, evaluations are a waste of time at best.
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Categories: Academic Standards
How is a professor supposed to learn from feedback when the course is over?
Student evaluations are blackmail and have contributed mightily to grade inflation. Finding out how much students have learned from a professor, and given their starting points, cannot be based on their on evalutations. Players’ evaluations of umpires at basketball games, for example, used to evaluating the umpires, can only result in crooked evaluations.