Gongol.com Archives: August 2025
August 6, 2025
The trouble with student evaluations
The biggest problem with student evaluations of their teachers isn't the room it opens up for mischief, even though that problem is quite significant, particularly as course evaluations become a prospective tool for government intervention at colleges and universities. That problem is emergent and well worth ongoing attention. But even in a world where every evaluation were submitted (and reviewed) entirely in good faith, the bigger problem is that students are almost by definition inadequately equipped to gauge what they're evaluating. ■ You don't know on the last day of class how much you will retain nor how well this instructor compares to one you didn't have, teaching the same course but in a different way. You can't know these things as a student on the final day of class -- unless, perhaps, you're taking the same class for the second time because you failed the first, in which case there's a decidedly strong conflict of interest. ■ The meaningful outcomes of a course -- from pre-kindergarten all the way through graduate school -- may remain unknown for a decade or more to come. A well-honed ability to compare and contrast teaching quality is unlikely to develop materially along the way. ■ If teacher evaluations have a meaningful impact on things like tenure or pay, then the whole thing sets up a terrible incentive structure, rewarding whatever impresses students in the short term rather than what improves their outcomes for the long term. This is one of the reasons why performance pay for teachers is such a difficult topic: In a truly rational world, teachers should be incentivized to do what optimizes outcomes for their students many years into the future. ■ That doesn't mean students shouldn't be asked for evaluations -- especially open-ended ones. But evaluations constructed with badly-chosen metrics and performed by ill-equipped evaluators can't help but cause bad outcomes. Signs are pointing to their increasing use, so it's prudent to pay attention now.
