Faculty evaluations I

While on sabbatical I have tried to keep from thinking about student attitudes on teaching, but when you have  been in the classroom as long as I have it is difficult.  And then today I received my course evaluations from the Fall semester.  I will try to save my direct response to my students for rateyourstudents.com.  Instead, I will explore the nature of faculty evaluation itself.

Some people view faculty evaluations as customer satisfaction surveys.  Sorry folks but you are surveying the wrong people if that is your goal.  One of the main points of higher education is to prepare the graduates to become a useful members of society by giving them the skills necessary for a career.  A politically incorrect analogy is, if you want to make a customer satisfaction survey of who make the best burgers, you don't ask the cattle.  You ask the actual consumer.  

Many students are interested in getting the highest possible grade for the least amount of effort.  To them the grade is needed to buy their way into graduate or professional school or a job where their natural ability will shine.  Such students evaluate courses and faculty members based on their needs, which are only tangentially connected with becoming useful members of society.

You want to know if a faculty member did a good job educating the students?  Ask the person who depends on the skills those students were to acquire.  If they teach a course that is a prerequisite for a couple of later courses.  Ask those faculty members in the later courses.  When the course is a senior level course ask the employer or graduate schools the student goes to after graduation. 

And if the necessary skills are not there, let's send the student back for a repeat at no cost to the taxpayer or student.  Make the faculty member/department/university pay to fix their product.  As an added benefit education reporters will be employed writing new articles about rampant grade deflation.  I have commented before about the duty of higher education to provide certification.  We need a education lemon law.  

As faculty evaluations become increasingly used to evaluate faculty for tenure and promotion, and students demand less and less real challenge and honest evaluation of their skills, we engage in a race to the bottom in terms of educational quality.  The education lemon law would allow the real customers to weigh in.  The Retention, Tenure, and Promotion committees could ask, how many lemons did this faculty member produce.  Too many lemons could be grounds for both denying or revoking tenure by demonstrating the incompetence of the faculty member.

Sorry, came close to ranting there.  In the next part of this epistle I promise to comment on the valid application of student opinion in faculty evaluations.