The Review: Course evaluations are garbage science.

So why do administrators keep demanding them? ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. In a recent [essay]( in our pages, the Cornell psychologists Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci review evidence about sexism in the academic sciences and find that, in most areas — hiring and promotion, grants, and salary — there’s much less of it than is often supposed. But they note one exception: students’ teaching evaluations. “The fact that teaching ratings are sexist,” they write, “is valuable information, suggesting that the use of these ratings should be carefully considered.” Williams and Ceci’s meta-analysis of “a very large number of studies across all academic fields” provides further quantitative grounding for what everyone already knows: Teaching evaluations are a mess. As David Delgado Shorter has [discussed]( also in our pages, the evidence that teaching evaluations reflect racial and gender bias on the part of students dates back over 40 years. Even more damning, “good” student evaluations may be negatively correlated with academic achievement. According to Bill Harbaugh, an economist at the University of Oregon who has [studied]( the matter, students enrolled in classes taught by professors with high student ratings actually learn less. SPONSOR CONTENT | Stevens Institute of Technology [Stevens Institute of Technology Is All in on AI]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. The most comprehensive recent analysis of the situation is Wolfgang Stroebe’s widely cited 2020 [article]( in Basic and Applied Social Psychology, whose title says it all: “Student Evaluations of Teaching Encourages Poor Teaching and Contributes to Grade Inflation.” Teaching evaluations, Stroebel concludes, fail to measure actual learning, illegitimately reward teacher attractiveness, penalize minorities and women, and trigger cascading grade inflation. And because “there is evidence that faculty members in precarious positions (e.g., young tenure-track faculty) will be particularly motivated to improve the ratings they receive for their course by grading leniently,” teaching evalutations corrupt the classroom at its root. As a junior faculty member said to me earlier this month, “I’ve arrived at the point of the semester where I consider giving everyone a big grade boost on their last paper to juice my pre-tenure-review evals.” Despite their well-documented failings, such evaluations are now almost ubiquitous: 94 percent of colleges collected course evaluations in 2010, compared to just 29 percent in 1973. Why? I don’t pretend to know, but Jordan J. Titus, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, has as good an answer as any I’ve seen: “The intellectual work of faculty is being replaced by a new obligation to be service providers to consumers.” That’s from “Student Ratings in a Consumerist Academy: Leveraging Pedagogic Control and Authority,” a 2008 [article]( in Sociological Perspectives. The ubiquity of evaluations is part of a larger process whereby “academic control and professional authority are transferred from faculty to students.” And to administrators, one might add. As “[student entitlement]( increases, so too does the pressure on administrators to satisfy student demands. From this point of view, evaluations are a kind of disciplinary tool, a stick management uses to make sure the faculty satisfies the customers. When the concept of student evaluations was first developed in the 1920s, by the psychologists Herman H. Remmers, at Purdue University, and Edwin R. Guthrie, at the University of Washington, administrators were never meant to have access to them. Remmers and Guthrie saw evaluations as modest tools for pedagogical improvement, not criteria of administrative judgment. In the 1950s, Guthrie warned about the misuse of evaluations. But no one listened. Instead, as Stroebe writes, they “soon became valued sources of information for university administrators, who used them as a basis for decisions about merit increases and promotion.” Is it too late to return to Remmers and Guthrie’s original conception? ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [How Chapters Shaped the History of Reading]( By Catherine Gallagher [STORY IMAGE]( Nicholas Dames’s new book considers a literary feature that scholars usually neglect. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The Line Between Knowledge and Magic Is Thinner Than We Think]( By Colin Dickey [STORY IMAGE]( Anthony Grafton’s alternate history of the Renaissance. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Slouching Toward Sensitivity]( By Janet Burroway [STORY IMAGE]( Content warning: This essay contains obscenities, slurs, sex, bullying, child abuse, alcoholism, pregnancy, addiction, murder, suicide, religion, culture, opinions, politics, language, and academe. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [How Sexist Is Science?]( By Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci [STORY IMAGE]( The findings are more complicated than is often reported. Recommended - “A certain kind of individualism, one more spiritual than political, was his alternative to the complacency he diagnosed in both secular and religious institutions.” In The Nation, Clare Carlisle [writes about]( Kierkegaard, by way of Bruce H. Kirmmse’s new translation of The Sickness Unto Death. - “As with so many things in the postwar period, the 1960s radicals painted the target, and the 1980s neoliberals fired the killer shot.” In The Critic, Philip Pilkington [recounts]( the shuttering of psychiatric asylums. - “The inability to commit to something outside oneself is often punctuated by spasms of fanatical commitment.” In Commonweal, Alex Stern [reviews]( three new books that look to “the religious and philosophical traditions of the past” in search of “the resources to mitigate atomism and alienation.” - “Film — fiction or documentary — should not concern itself with the facts of ordinary existence, which are the province of the journalist, the bureaucrat, and the accountant.” In the London Review of Books, David Trotter on [Werner Herzog](. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | The University of Queensland [From Waste to Wonder]( A University of Queensland research group is leading the way for widespread change in the mining industry. FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Surviving as a Small College - The Chronicle Store]( [Surviving as a Small College]( The past decade has been especially hard on small colleges. There’s stiffer competition for traditional-age students and many students are harder to win over. [Order your copy]( to examine the challenges facing small colleges, insights on how they might surmount them, and the benefits distinct to these unique institutions. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2023 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037