Why Professors Are Obsessed with Student Course Evaluations

One of the things that most frightens non-tenured faculty members is the prospect of getting too low an average on end-of-term student course evaluations. 

That is the central point in Stacey Patton’s May 19 Chronicle of Higher Education piece Student Evaluations: Feared, Loathed, and Not Going Anywhere. She writes about the obsession that grips non-tenured faculty members in a humanities department at a “West Coast research university.” The obsession is with getting at least a 4.7 average on the five-point scale used for course evaluations.

Patton quotes one such professor (who goes by “Janet Wilson,” fearing adverse career repercussions if she used her real name) who says that she and other department members “talk about how to reach 4.7 more than we talk about how to teach.”

There is an abundance of helpful ideas on how to elevate your scores in the article.

Here are some of them: bake cookies or brownies for the students, hand out the evaluations when the most irascible student is absent, give the evaluation right after a puff assignment such as “an easy paper where they can talk about themselves,” don’t give students much time to fill out the forms, which increases the likelihood they will just circle all 5s and hurry out, and let students “hand in papers late, retake exams like it’s the DMV, and complete extra credit.”

Our Janet Wilson concludes, “We all know we can’t afford to uphold grading standards because of the pressure put on us.”

Exactly, and Patton observes, “Faculty members speak of evaluations’ driving decisions on hiring, promotion, and tenure; adjuncts say they feel paralyzed when a low score can mean a pink slip.”

Cookies, si; rigorous grading, no. 

Fear that unhappy students will cost a professor his or her job is not just a hobgoblin. Several years ago, Norfolk State University terminated an experienced biology professor, Stephen Aird, because his grades were “too low.” Not undeserved, mind you, but just too low to keep the students satisfied.

That’s what American higher education has come to and here is the reason. At many colleges, keeping the students happy is the paramount concern. School officials still pay lip service to academic excellence, but the truth is that revenue maximization is far more important to them. 

Happy students are more apt to remain enrolled than unhappy ones. That’s why faculty members are under pressure to show “good” evaluation numbers, even though that means treating all of the students like little kids. 

If most college students were seriously looking for education, they wouldn’t want to be treated that way. If they really wanted to learn to write well, for instance, they wouldn’t object when a professor took a red pen to their drafts and showed them where their writing was poor. 

A professor who found that out the hard way, some two decades ago, is Peter Sacks. His book Generation X Goes to College was among the first I read when I came to the Pope Center. It discussed his first year of teaching journalism at an unnamed but clearly non-selective college. He wanted to teach an academically strong course and demanded quite a lot of writing from his students, all of which he carefully critiqued.

Then came his first course evaluations. After his superiors had read them, Sacks was called in for a meeting. The chairman was concerned over the fact that so many of the students had given the course very low marks. He let Sacks know that he would not be rehired if his evaluations remained so terrible. 

In his next semester, Sacks embarked upon what he called his “sandbox experiment.” That meant easing up on the students. More fun, less work, little criticism. The result was exactly what he wanted and needed—high course evaluation numbers. He had made his students happy by watering down his course.

It’s too bad that so few students enter college with a desire to work hard and thereby improve their knowledge and skills. 

Far more of them enter college with an entitlement mindset that has them thinking, “I’ve always been told I’m a good student and therefore deserve good grades.” Taking their evaluations seriously only helps to further erode our pitiable academic standards.

Course evaluations might make sense at a level where the students were both dedicated and somewhat knowledgeable about the subject. Professors fortunate enough to teach such students would probably welcome their feedback since it could help them improve the course.  

But asking the typical freshman or sophomore to rank a course and comment on it rarely produces any valuable insights. It merely encourages faculty members to worry about their popularity instead of worrying about teaching a sound, challenging course.

It is also worth noting that more than a few dedicated educators who couldn’t stand the “keep ‘em happy” imperative have left teaching. They have been replaced by the brownie bakers, deadline extenders, and extra-credit givers who are content to abase themselves and undermine academic standards for fear of bad evaluations by students who really shouldn’t be in college in the first place.