Article Provides Excellent Critique Of Student Evaluations In College, But Misses Obvious Solution

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How Teacher Evaluations Broke the University is an article in The Atlantic (it’s behind a paywall, but you can still access it here).

It provides an excellent critique of how student evaluations of professors are misused by colleges to make decisions about tenure and salary.

I’m a huge fan of the usefulness of student evaluations, and have blogged about it often (see Best Posts On Students Evaluating Classes (And Teachers)).  However, I have always been opposed to their use in any kind of formal evaluation process.  They can provide excellent feedback, and their use has made me a far better teacher.  But, for the same reasons articulated in The Atlantic article, institutional use of them would have a major corrupting influence on how helpful they would be.

Surprisingly to me, the article only offers one alternative method of helping professors improve their teaching skill – peer review.  However, precisely because of what the article says – most university hiring decisions are made on research, not teaching, skills, even if there was interest in doing peer review, it would be like the “clueless leading the clueless.”

Why can’t universities just do what many K-12 districts and schools do – hire trained instructional coaches to help teachers”