We are the students’ instructors and teachers, not their buddy or best-friend-forever. Sometimes you have to be the parent and the adult. We are responsible for creating a situation in which they will learn and hopefully retain the learning. Too often, student evaluations of a course are a popularity contest with all of the trappings and issues. In some cases, instructors implicitly or explicitly realize this and teach to the evaluations without really worrying about real learning or quality. We consider this form of pandering to be unprofessional and a dereliction of duty.
We have observed superb instructors receive amazingly low student evaluations, and less than admirable instructors receive high evaluations repeatedly and be rewarded unjustly. The amount of imbalance depends on how much emphasis the respective departments, faculties, and institutions place on the student instrument.
Student evaluations and feedback are discussed in separate notes: listening to what the students have to say, using student feedback, helping students evaluate courses, perception surveys, class feed back, and surveys and polls.
We have listened to top students complain about the edutainment instructors who present fantastic classroom experiences with high engagement and where students enjoy attending class, but where the students are not sure what they have learned and are not aware of any lasting learning.
