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Course evaluations should not be used to award tenure, though they are still valuable for professors

A paper recently drafted by two University of California at Berkeley professors argues student course evaluations are a poor measure of professors’ teaching abilities. The paper also argues evaluations should not be used for determining whether a professor should get tenure.

Considering course evaluations in tenure does give too much weight to student opinion, which does not come from a position of expertise and could be skewed toward extreme results. But that is not to say course evaluations are completely useless in institutions of higher education.

At the University, course evaluations are offered online, though some departments distribute paper copies in class. With an optional online course evaluation, data is likely to come either from students who hated the class or loved it. Those with strong emotions about a course, at either end of the spectrum, are more likely to give feedback when that feedback is optional, so the data set will be missing many of those students who fell in the middle.

Distributing paper evaluations, like the some University departments do, or making evaluations mandatory could solicit a larger sample size and counteract the more extreme viewpoints, but even these methods are not guaranteed to garner a good set of data. Students may still rush through the evaluations just to get them done and not put a lot of thought into them.

Small classes are especially at risk for being weighed down by extreme viewpoints. Students who have gotten poor grades throughout the semester may be more likely to give the instructor a low rating. Though it is possible a student’s poor performance was a result of the instructor’s poor teaching skills, there are too many other factors to determine this causation conclusively. For example, the student could be taking a class to fill a graduation requirement but not have any natural aptitude in the subject.

Though course evaluations are not a good measure of whether a professor deserves a tenured position, they still give students a sense of efficacy and give professors an opportunity to make valuable improvements to their courses.

Questions like “did you think the instructor was an effective teacher?” are too broad to be helpful. Questions written by the instructors themselves would be more fitting. Professors could ask for feedback on specific aspects of the course — lecture or discussion style, readings, writing or presentation assignments — on which students can offer a valuable perspective.

Students would also be more likely to complete evaluations that were personally designed by professors. Redundantly phrased questions asking students to quantify broad characteristics like instructor effectiveness do not require a lot of creative effort and do not make a student feel like he can offer an individualized account of his experience. Open-ended questions specific to the class allow for this opportunity.

Department leaders can also design more broad questions which will allow them to make recommendations to their staffs in case professors do not read their evaluations, or do not pay close attention to them.

Even though quantitative data is too difficult to glean from course evaluations, their potential qualitative data is still crucial. Students should play a role in the process in shaping the courses at their university to enrich and improve the educational experiences of their peers.

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