Dive Brief:
- While faculty often fear the repercussions of student evaluations, they are still an ingrained method of evaluation at the nation’s colleges and universities.
- Vitae reports instructors find ways to bribe students into good evals — with baked goods, extra credit options, etc. — foregoing substantive conversations with their colleagues about practice in favor of tricks.
- Administrators still incorporate these evaluations, from sometimes cruel and vindictive teenagers, into promotion and employment decisions, elevating students at some institutions to the position of customers who are “always right,” according to the article.
Dive Insight:
Teacher evaluations have gotten significantly more attention in the K-12 sphere as politicians and advocacy groups have insisted schools hold teachers accountable for their students’ performance. States have implemented “value-added measures,” undertaking complex formulas to decide just how much student learning can be attributed to individual teachers.
While the movement for accountability hasn’t been as pronounced in higher education, Vitae reports Iowa State Sen. Mark Chelgren introduced a bill earlier this year that would have required professors at all levels be fired because of bad evaluations, claiming the high cost of higher education justified extreme measures to give students more power. That bill didn’t go anywhere but its genesis illustrates the political fervor for accountability across the education world.