Stuart Rojstaczer, a former professor of geology and civil engineering at Duke University, is the creator of of the Grade Inflation Web site. He is writing a book about undergraduate education in the U.S.

Student evaluations are a poor indicator of professor performance. The good news is that college students often reward instructors who teach well. The bad news is that students often conflate good instruction with pleasant ambience and low expectations. As a result they also reward instructors who grade easily, require little work, are glib and chatty, wear nice clothes, and are physically attractive. It’s generally impossible to separate all these factors in an evaluation. Plus, students will penalize demanding professors or professors who have given them a bad grade, regardless of the quality of instruction that a professor provides. In the end, deans and tenure committees are using bad data to evaluate professor performance, while professors feel pressure to grade easier and reduce workloads to receive higher evaluations.

Student evaluations can be useful when they are divorced from tenure, retention and promotion evaluations

Student evaluations can be useful when they are divorced from tenure, retention and promotion evaluations. If a professor asks students to anonymously provide information on what works and what doesn’t in a classroom and come up with suggestions for improving the class, students can often provide valuable feedback. But this kind of information is essentially constructive criticism, an anonymous dialog between the professor and student. It shouldn’t be transmitted to higher-ups in university administration.

Professors do, of course, need to be evaluated as to how well they teach. If student evaluations were abandoned, how would this be done? For lower-division classes, it’s often possible to infer the quality of instruction by measuring how students perform, on average, on the next sequence in a study area (such as Spanish II or Calculus II). In upper-division courses, inferences can be made on instructor quality from the outcomes of graduates in the major area of study. One can examine whether a professor has inspired an unusual number (either large or small) of undergraduates students to choose careers in that professor’s subject area. Such outcome-based measures would require extra work, but they would also tend to be fairer and ultimately more informative than the bubble sheets filled out by students today.