Mutual decline: the failings of student evaluations

The untaxed mind is a dangerous thing, and students, unaware of this, insist on their possessing a level of prowess and learning that is the equal of the instructor.  This is not discouraged by the administrative apparatchiks of various committees who make it their business to soil decent syllabi with dumbed down efforts such as “workshops” and “group work” to accommodate the modern student who supposedly has a limited, social media concentration span.  To them, the individual thinker – student or instructor – is a sworn enemy and must be ignored or silenced.

There is ample evidence, diligently ignored by university management, suggesting how the introduction of such surveys has been, not merely corrupting but disastrous for the groves of academe.  Take, for instance, gender bias, which has a marked way of intruding into the exercise.  Clayton N. Tatro found in a 1995 analysis of 537 male and female student questionnaires that both the gender of the instructor and the relevant grade “were significant predictors of evaluations”.  Broadly speaking, the female students gave higher rating evaluations than their male counterparts. Female instructors did better in the evaluation scores than their male peers.  Female instructors also did better in their scores with female respondents.   

Learning is a process of perennial discomfort, not constant reassurance.  The pinprick of awareness is far better than the smothering pillow.  Genuine learning is meant to shatter models and presumptions, propelling the mind into enlightened, new domains.  The student evaluation form is the enemy of the process, a stifling effect that disempowers all even as it claims to enhance quality.

Where to, then, with evaluating teaching?  There is something to be said about the element of risk: there will always be good and bad teachers, and that very experience of being taught by individuals as varying as the pedestrian reader of lecture notes or the charming raconteur of learned anecdotes should be part of the pedagogical quest.  From such variety grows resilience, something that customer satisfaction cannot tolerate.

Education specialists, administrators and those who staff that fairly meaningless body known as Learning and Teaching, cannot leave the instructing process alone.  For them, some form of evaluation exercise must exist to placate the gods of funding and quality assurance pen pushers.

What then, to be done?  Geoff Schneider, in a study considering the links between student evaluations, grade inflation and teaching, puts it this way -  though he does so with a kind of blinkered optimism. 

In order to improve the quality of teaching, it is important for universities to develop a system for evaluating teaching that emphasizes (and rewards) the degree of challenge and learning that occurs in courses. 

Snow balls suffering an unenviable fate in hell comes to mind.