Student teaching evaluations lead to lower academic standards in higher education
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Recent meta-analytic evidence indicates that high-stakes reliance on student evaluations of teaching incentivizes leniency and erodes academic standards, whereas historical empirical research found no significant relationship between student evaluation practices and institutional average grades.
A student evaluation of teaching effectiveness (SETE) is often the most influential information in promotion and tenure decision at colleges and universities focused on teaching. Unfortunately, this instrument often fails to capture the lecturer’s ability to foster the creation of learning and to serve as a tool for improving instruction. In fact, it often serves as a disincentive to introducing rigour. This paper performs a qualitative (e.g. case studies) and quantitative (e.g. empirical research) literature review of student evaluations as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Problems are highlighted and suggestions offered to improve SETEs and to refocus teaching effectiveness on outcome‐based academic standards.
This study investigated an apparent dilemma suggested by previous research on faculty orientations toward students and academic standards. Some research suggests that encouraging faculty to be student-centered is an effective way to increase student learning and development, while other research indicates that being student-centered leads to lenient grading and lower academic standards. Information was obtained from 134 institutions based on a longitudinal data set from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, providing a nationally representative cohort of college freshmen who completed questionnaires upon entry in 1985 and again 4 years later in 1989. Faculty data were obtained from a Higher Education Research Institute survey of teaching practices. Student-centered evaluation methods were considered to be student presentations, student evaluations of each others' work, and weekly essay assignments. Using a series of multiple regression analyses predicting undergraduate grades, it was found that student evaluation practices and the ways in which faculty viewed their orientations toward students were not significantly related to institutional average grades. Faculty views of student-centeredness were also unrelated to institutional grades. (Contains 40 references.) (SW)
Background. End-of-course student evaluations of teaching (SETs) remain the dominant gauge of instructional quality, yet their validity and fairness have been repeatedly questioned. Purpose. This study re-examines whether SET scores capture durable learning and explores how high-stakes reliance on those scores reshapes academic behaviour. Methods. We integrated five complementary strands of secondary evidence: (a) a PRISMA-registered meta-analysis of 89 studies covering ≈5.4 million students, (b) re-analysis of two natural-experiment datasets with random instructor assignment, (c) psychometric audits of 14 institutional SET instruments, (d) computational text mining of 2.1 million open-ended comments, and (e) linkage of departmental SET means to alumni and employer outcomes. Results. Across studies, the pooled random-effects correlation between SETs and subsequent performance was r = 0.04 (95 % CI –0.03, 0.10), turning slightly negative after grade controls. Departments that tied contract renewal to minimum-SET thresholds exhibited a 0.27 GPA-point rise relative to matched controls, signalling grade inflation. Differential item functioning against female and racially minoritised faculty appeared in 9 of 23 common items, undermining measurement invariance. Programmes with high SET averages showed no advantage in alumni career readiness or employer satisfaction. Conclusions. Convergent evidence demonstrates that SETs fail to reflect long-term learning and introduce equity harms; their high-stakes use incentivises leniency that erodes academic standards. Universities seeking genuine teaching excellence should treat SETs as formative feedback, decouple them from punitive decisions, and adopt stakeholder-anchored, multi-measure frameworks that align evaluation with demonstrable learning.
Background. End-of-course student evaluations of teaching (SETs) remain the dominant gauge of instructional quality, yet their validity and fairness have been repeatedly questioned. Purpose. This study re-examines whether SET scores capture durable learning and explores how high-stakes reliance on those scores reshapes academic behaviour. Methods. We integrated five complementary strands of secondary evidence: (a) a PRISMA-registered meta-analysis of 89 studies covering ≈5.4 million students, (b) re-analysis of two natural-experiment datasets with random instructor assignment, (c) psychometric audits of 14 institutional SET instruments, (d) computational text mining of 2.1 million open-ended comments, and (e) linkage of departmental SET means to alumni and employer outcomes. Results. Across studies, the pooled random-effects correlation between SETs and subsequent performance was r = 0.04 (95 % CI –0.03, 0.10), turning slightly negative after grade controls. Departments that tied contract renewal to minimum-SET thresholds exhibited a 0.27 GPA-point rise relative to matched controls, signalling grade inflation. Differential item functioning against female and racially minoritised faculty appeared in 9 of 23 common items, undermining measurement invariance. Programmes with high SET averages showed no advantage in alumni career readiness or employer satisfaction. Conclusions. Convergent evidence demonstrates that SETs fail to reflect long-term learning and introduce equity harms; their high-stakes use incentivises leniency that erodes academic standards. Universities seeking genuine teaching excellence should treat SETs as formative feedback, decouple them from punitive decisions, and adopt stakeholder-anchored, multi-measure frameworks that align evaluation with demonstrable learning.
If one hangs around public universities that have less than selective admissions policies, one is bound to hear a litany of complaints about today's students. They lack the attitude required for productive and serious academic work, and too many lack disciplined study habits; they have short attention spans and very little patience with academic work. Furthermore, they are too frequently devoid of self-criticism, unable to delay gratification, intellectually incurious, and unwilling to tolerate principled difference. Sadly, some can even wear ignorance as an entitled right. Many, perhaps most, faculty openly applaud high standards and privately disdain colleagues with weak standards and high grades. The academic culture encourages exactly the kind of remedy many faculty publicly advocate: setting high but attainable standards that students must struggle to meet and that result in accomplishments in which they can justly take pride. Many students, after all, desire to possess degrees and grades that testify to their intellectual courage, effort, and accomplishment; they want an education that measures more than mere accumulation of credit hours. Despite acknowledging the need to expect more of students, however, individual faculty may anticipate that implementing stronger academic standards will lead to student backlash and consequent low student evaluations, hostile commentaries on RateMyProfessor.com, embarrassing grade appeals and grievances filed through a process that dem
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