Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

This is a short commentary piece, not exactly much there. There's some interesting comments, the one at the top right now says

"They are no doubt imprecise, but for a majority of the faculty the scores form a tight bunch around a mean. Newer faculty are likely to have lower scores, so it is often times useful to sit down with them and review the feedback and talk about ways to improve. A few faculty members continually score higher than average, and I want to know why--perhaps they can help do some mentoring with the lower scoring faculty."

No shit basing compensation on reviews by people who have an overt bias to blame the instructor.

The purpose of the review should be purely to provide feedback to the instructor and TA. It should not be available to the administration - the purpose is to help the TA and instructors improve their teaching. Especially if the instructors have tenure and so can’t be fired for failing to teach.

Ratings should also be scaled to control for biases - what are the average grades given by each student, how do they compare to other students in their classes, and to their course grade.

We pushed very hard at my alma mater to publicize course/teacher evaluations. We eventually got the University to accept iff a minimum participation rate was met (on a per course basis-- so it wasn't all or nothing. We'd get a subset of the data when enough participation occurred. We considered this reasonable, since if very few students participate, the data isn't all that meaningful).

Regarding professors wanting to keep review data tightly sealed: in my view, if you can't by public disclosure of your evaluation, then you either don't feel you're meeting expectations, or have no desire to improve in areas where students feel improvement could be made.

Also, the biases pointed out in these reviews aren't unique to academia. Gender and age biases exist everywhere. This article sounds like it's just pushing the idea that students should have less influence in the hiring and promotion decisions of professors. You know, the very people that the teachers first and foremost serve at a university.

Tying them directly indeed seems like a bad idea (like pretty much any other naive reputation score), but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on the feedback mechanism.

Just set a threshold - such as “scores an average of < 4/10”. If the score is below that threshold, invest a little more time and effort into getting more detailed evaluations and figuring out why the score is low and whether it’s a genuine problem with the professor vs something like their having high standards and lazy students. Then train or fire as appropriate.

If anything you would think professors would welcome reviews. They already get reviewed anyways. It's just word of mouth. At least a student could see a much wider range of opinions vs one person's experience.