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Let’s Abolish the Student Evaluation of Teaching
Students cannot provide constructive feedback about teaching.
One of the periodic humiliations teachers have to endure is the student evaluation of teaching. Every semester, college and university students are invited to insult and defame their teachers free from concerns about legal action or consequences of any kind.
Why do student evaluations of teaching exist? Even though everybody knows that they are not fair or useful, they are still taken into consideration during promotion and tenure decisions for tenure-track teachers, and they can lead to immediate termination or contract non-renewal for non-tenure-track teachers. So they exist in part to serve as a pretext to deny promotion or terminate employment.
They certainly do not work for their stated purpose of evaluating teaching, yet every year most teachers are asked to reflect on what they have learned about how students feel about their teaching and devise ways to change the way they teach based on student feedback.
There is no question in my mind that student evaluations of teaching are harmful and need to be abolished, but they may actually shield teachers to an extent. They may provide a relatively harmless forum for students to air their grievances, which may have the effect of…
