The most comprehensive recent analysis of the situation is Wolfgang Stroebe’s widely cited 2020 article in Basic and Applied Social Psychology, whose title says it all: “Student Evaluations of Teaching Encourages Poor Teaching and Contributes to Grade Inflation.” Teaching evaluations, Stroebel concludes, fail to measure actual learning, illegitimately reward teacher attractiveness, penalize minorities and women, and trigger cascading grade inflation. And because “there is evidence that faculty members in precarious positions (e.g., young tenure-track faculty) will be particularly motivated to improve the ratings they receive for their course by grading leniently,” teaching evalutations corrupt the classroom at its root. As a junior faculty member said to me earlier this month, “I’ve arrived at the point of the semester where I consider giving everyone a big grade boost on their last paper to juice my pre-tenure-review evals.”
Despite their well-documented failings, such evaluations are now almost ubiquitous: 94 percent of colleges collected course evaluations in 2010, compared to just 29 percent in 1973. Why? I don’t pretend to know, but Jordan J. Titus, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, has as good an answer as any I’ve seen: “The intellectual work of faculty is being replaced by a new obligation to be service providers to consumers.” That’s from “Student Ratings in a Consumerist Academy: Leveraging Pedagogic Control and Authority,” a 2008 article in Sociological Perspectives. The ubiquity of evaluations is part of a larger process whereby “academic control and professional authority are transferred from faculty to students.” And to administrators, one might add. As “student entitlement” increases, so too does the pressure on administrators to satisfy student demands. From this point of view, evaluations are a kind of disciplinary tool, a stick management uses to make sure the faculty satisfies the customers.
When the concept of student evaluations was first developed in the 1920s, by the psychologists Herman H. Remmers, at Purdue University, and Edwin R. Guthrie, at the University of Washington, administrators were never meant to have access to them. Remmers and Guthrie saw evaluations as modest tools for pedagogical improvement, not criteria of administrative judgment. In the 1950s, Guthrie warned about the misuse of evaluations. But no one listened. Instead, as Stroebe writes, they “soon became valued sources of information for university administrators, who used them as a basis for decisions about merit increases and promotion.” Is it too late to return to Remmers and Guthrie’s original conception?
