Student Course Evaluation

The popular press article “Student Course Evaluation Gets an ‘F’” by Anya Kamenetz talks about how student evaluations that are given at the end of a course can matter heavily to a professor trying to earn a promotion. Typically course evaluations are the only source of information a university uses to monitor the progress and success a professor has in his/her classroom. A number of faculty members from a university have been pushing research to support that these student evaluations may not be telling the full truth. A huge issue with these student evaluations is the participation rate can be very low. For instance, if a professor does not sit well with students that did not do well in his/her class then they might have more negative evaluations because they did not perform like they would have liked too. Typically a very happy or very unhappy student will be the one to fill out the course evaluations (Kamenetz, 2). This is very difficult to evaluate a professor off of these scores because the university will usually average these results.

Another issue that some faculty may not have had the experience with the student like other professors may have had which can relate to upper-level classes having fewer student so there is time for a relationship to be made. Another way to evaluate the way a professor performs in the classroom is to

I felt like the popular press article was kind of hoping around and did not focus on the bigger issue of when are student evaluations effective and not effective. It talked about other types of evaluations that could be done, but this did not focus on the main topic of students taking evaluations about their professors. I think if they would have talked more about a student’s mindset in giving a more positive or negative evaluation this would have fit better with the actual study that was