[QUOTE id="dd3b8617-0971-4f7a-a67c-28a7b171df05"]Evaluations were introduced back in the 60s to give voice to oppressed/marginalized students (women/minorities) who were treated in all sorts of heinous ways. They were never intended as consumer surveys. They were effective for eliminating a certain kind of classroom behavior, and they should now be eliminated, for they now negatively effect the quality of a university education. First of all, students are not qualified to evaluate teachers: they have never taught and they know nothing about the subject being taught. While many students take the task as seriously as it deserves (choosing a column and filling out the dots as if they were in a race), others use the evaluations recklessly, as a way to damage the morale and reputation of a teacher. More importantly, administration uses evaluations to avoid the real work of evaluating their professors. If professors were observed in the classroom, observers would see that their classrooms were empty, the students disengaged, the work pointless, etc. In reality, low student evaluations are as likely to signal a teacher who makes real demands upon students and has the courage to grade honestly, as they are to signal a lousy teacher. Without classroom context, the evaluations are pretty much meaningless as an evaluative tool. In any case, teaching isn't really valued by Penn students. They are here because they want a brand name. It's well known that elite research universities are not places that value teaching -- they don't care about undergraduates. Elite research faculty are elite because they publish their research. There is no track for elite teaching faculty. So lousy teaching is acceptable, expected, even rewarded. Those who prefer to spend their time in asocial activities and places (libraries and research labs) will likely get reduced teaching time. They are happy to drive away students: fewer papers to grade, people to deal with. And no matter how bad their evaluations are, their jobs are secure and you'll keep coming to Penn because of their brand names. In short, you are complicit. Your negative evaluations only hurt good teachers, who are already in jeopardy at places like Penn because good teachers--who spend the bulk of their time researching and preparing to teach their subjects, and considering how best to do that, and meeting with their students-- expose how lousy are their brand name colleagues, who mostly put as little effort into teaching as possible. A modest bit of negative criticism of a good teacher demoralizes and endangers his job, for other faculty generally resent and try to undermine good teachers. A volley of negative criticism of faculty who put no effort into teaching but rather into advancing their reputation will have no effect whatsoever. Goes with the territory. In short, student evaluations mostly hurt the best teachers, and have no impact on the lousy teachers, and to the extent that great teaching is vanishing, students are very much complicit. If students were smart, rather than consumers, they'd insist upon real evaluation of professors--peer review--with the best teaching faculty observing classes, looking over assignments and syllabi and the quality of work and learning by students, rewarding faculty who are brilliant teachers in the same way that they reward faculty who are brilliant researchers. A real educational environment needs both, and often they are two very different types of individuals.[/QUOTE] Your arguments are bad on so many levels it is difficult to know where to begin. No, the teachers who get low evaluations are not the hardest graders. Just look at the Penn Course Review online. Many professors with the highest ratings are also hard graders, and joke classes that are easy usually receive low marks, because the students know their time could have been spent more wisely. Also, because it is a research university, it is essential to evaluate teachers. Many of the teachers who get the lowest ratings are not stupid people, they just don't care and are here for research purposes primarily. Students deserve to know which of their professors take the job seriously and which not, so that they can pick classes where their teacher is excited to be there and will make the material interesting. And about the whole "students just aren't qualified" and "don't know the material." BS! Outside of intro classes, students take courses in which they are interested in great part because they DO know something about the material. And yes, you can recognize who is or isn't a good teacher without having a PhD yourself. To suggest otherwise is so ignorant as to be obscurantist. In short, teachers need an incentive to teach well and even if that doesn't work, students need the course review database to know who are the ones worth taking and who should be avoided all together. To argue for less accountability on the side of professors is your prerogative, sure, but please don't pretend you seriously have a point when you just have a cynical view of the average Penn student. I'm interested in knowing which of the four schools you attend(ed) and what your major is, as I wonder if the efficacy and sense behind grading evaluations varies with the field (not trying to get personal). In other words, if you were in the college and took history or Spanish courses, I have no idea how you could ever have come to the conclusion you did. I think we need more teacher evaluations.

The "in short" comment sounds like a professor who got a poor evaluation. And to say that students are not qualified to evaluate teachers, that's interesting too. I can only comment from a graduate student perspective, but many of my classmates are teachers. Also, as a student you can compare and contrast the different pedagogies, methodologies, etc. to see what's effective and what's not. So yes, students are qualified. I stuck around in a class that I hate because I just wanted to get it done and over with. I think the professor is awful, as do many of my classmates. It's not that the professor grades harshly, the grading is obscure or not done at all. I've been waiting all semester for the course evaluation. And I don't have anything nice to say at all.

The student evaluations don't mean anything to anybody. No one gets fired for being a lousy teacher, and no one gets a raise for being a good teacher. The evaluations are a gimmick to make bitter students like the graduate student above feel as if they have a "voice." Spare me. Students don't know how to teach (and that includes the graduate students who imagine otherwise) so they should keep their insightful advice to themselves. Lousy teachers ignore evaluations because a) it's human nature to ignore mean-spirited remarks and b) the remarks are useless for the evaluators have no expertise. Good teachers read evaluations because it's nice to hear some happy words at the end of a semester.

[QUOTE id="05e5724a-7f67-497e-a480-2dc9d0408e6c"]The student evaluations don't mean anything to anybody. No one gets fired for being a lousy teacher, and no one gets a raise for being a good teacher. The evaluations are a gimmick to make bitter students like the graduate student above feel as if they have a "voice." Spare me. Students don't know how to teach (and that includes the graduate students who imagine otherwise) so they should keep their insightful advice to themselves. Lousy teachers ignore evaluations because a) it's human nature to ignore mean-spirited remarks and b) the remarks are useless for the evaluators have no expertise. Good teachers read evaluations because it's nice to hear some happy words at the end of a semester.[/QUOTE] You make the unsubstantiated assertion that students aren't qualified to say who is and isn't a good professor. That is nothing more than you're venting personal, subjective opinions that are not reasoned but merely elitist, stupid garbage. I think it more preposterous to allege that only people with PhD's have valid opinions of teaching styles than to allege that all human beings can naturally tell when a professor makes him or her excited to learn and interested in the material and when not. Or are people just too stupid to ever trust and should be told what their opinions are instead of solicited? That's like a marxist saying we should tell people when their quality of life is good or not, as people aren't capable of knowing when they feel fulfilled and satisfied under one form of rule or another, therefore to solicit their opinion is pointless. Are students always wrong when they believed they learned more under one professor's pedagogy than another? And these evaluations are very useful, even if all they do is provide students with the knowledge of which professors are good and which aren't worth someone's time. How stupid must a student be if he has left every single class he's ever taken saying to himself, "I'm not sure if I've ever had a teacher who taught better than any other, as I do not know when I am interested in the material or not, or whether I felt like I learned something." If you are incapable of evaluating teachers, just say that, but don't think that everyone on earth with a PhD is incapable of it. If you are troubled that it appears I'm making an ad hominem attack against you, let me remind you that your entire argument is itself an enormous unsubstantiated ad hominem attack.

I would just like to note that when someone applies for an academic position, at least in the humanities, the are required to submit previous teaching evaluations. How much weight is put on these evaluations varies by institution, but students reviewing a class should know that what they write lives on past that single semester, and is often given weight.

Evaluations were introduced back in the 60s to give voice to oppressed/marginalized students (women/minorities) who were treated in all sorts of heinous ways. They were never intended as consumer surveys. They were effective for eliminating a certain kind of classroom behavior, and they should now be eliminated, for they now negatively effect the quality of a university education. First of all, students are not qualified to evaluate teachers: they have never taught and they know nothing about the subject being taught. While many students take the task as seriously as it deserves (choosing a column and filling out the dots as if they were in a race), others use the evaluations recklessly, as a way to damage the morale and reputation of a teacher. More importantly, administration uses evaluations to avoid the real work of evaluating their professors. If professors were observed in the classroom, observers would see that their classrooms were empty, the students disengaged, the work pointless, etc. In reality, low student evaluations are as likely to signal a teacher who makes real demands upon students and has the courage to grade honestly, as they are to signal a lousy teacher. Without classroom context, the evaluations are pretty much meaningless as an evaluative tool. In any case, teaching isn't really valued by Penn students. They are here because they want a brand name. It's well known that elite research universities are not places that value teaching -- they don't care about undergraduates. Elite research faculty are elite because they publish their research. There is no track for elite teaching faculty. So lousy teaching is acceptable, expected, even rewarded. Those who prefer to spend their time in asocial activities and places (libraries and research labs) will likely get reduced teaching time. They are happy to drive away students: fewer papers to grade, people to deal with. And no matter how bad their evaluations are, their jobs are secure and you'll keep coming to Penn because of their brand names. In short, you are complicit. Your negative evaluations only hurt good teachers, who are already in jeopardy at places like Penn because good teachers--who spend the bulk of their time researching and preparing to teach their subjects, and considering how best to do that, and meeting with their students-- expose how lousy are their brand name colleagues, who mostly put as little effort into teaching as possible. A modest bit of negative criticism of a good teacher demoralizes and endangers his job, for other faculty generally resent and try to undermine good teachers. A volley of negative criticism of faculty who put no effort into teaching but rather into advancing their reputation will have no effect whatsoever. Goes with the territory. In short, student evaluations mostly hurt the best teachers, and have no impact on the lousy teachers, and to the extent that great teaching is vanishing, students are very much complicit. If students were smart, rather than consumers, they'd insist upon real evaluation of professors--peer review--with the best teaching faculty observing classes, looking over assignments and syllabi and the quality of work and learning by students, rewarding faculty who are brilliant teachers in the same way that they reward faculty who are brilliant researchers. A real educational environment needs both, and often they are two very different types of individuals.