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Aside from the issue of the actual validity of student evaluations is a potentially more important question, namely, their perceived validity. Although some teachers are fired because of student evaluations, most figure out how to get better evaluations. The effect of student evaluations depends less on their actual validity than it does on theories that teachers hold of how changes they can make in their teaching would affect their evaluations. Because student evaluations are used as input to tenure, promotion, and salary decisions, teachers will act in what they believe to be their self-interest, so they will make changes that they think will get higher ratings. Therefore, I surveyed our faculty to find out what changes teachers believe would improve or hurt their ratings.
Survey of Faculty
During the last two weeks of the Spring Semester, 1998, I sent messages by email to teaching faculty inviting them to participate in a survey on student evaluations. Within one month, 208 members of the faculty of CSUF completed the survey via the Internet. (The email was also forwarded to faculty at other universities around the world; those data are still coming in and will be the subject of a separate analysis).
In the CSUF sample were 105 Full professors with tenure, 31 Associate Professors with tenure, 30 untenured Assistant and Associate professors, and 38 lecturers. There were 76 faculty members with less than 12 years experience teaching, 66 with 12 to 24 years, and 64 with more than 24 years of experience.
Results of the Faculty Survey
Faculty Theories of Student Evaluations.
If you were to RAISE standards for grades in your class, would it affect your student evaluations? Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed (65.4%* or 136) reported that higher standards would result in lower evaluations against only 3.4% (7) who thought the opposite would occur, and the others stated it would make no difference.
(*Throughout this paper, asterisks will be used to indicate that the split is statistically significant, with a = .05, by a two-tailed, binomial sign test against the hypothesis that the probability of the response and its opposite are equally likely. The statistical result in the above case is equivalent to the probability of tossing 143 coins and finding that 136 are heads and 7 tails. This event has a standard deviate of z = 10.79, which corresponds to a miniscule probability (|z| > 1.96 would be significant); therefore, we reject the hypothesis that this split occurred by chance).
Two different theories have been proposed to explain why students may give higher evaluations to professors who give them higher grades (apart from any change in learning). One theory is that students like to receive good grades and they like people who give them what they want. The other is that students attribute their high grades to the success of the teacher in educating them. According to this theory, students have no way to know if their knowledge of the material qualifies them to undertake the next course in the sequence; therefore, students mistakenly believe that high grades mean that they have mastered the content. A third theory proposed in which higher standards might produce higher ratings is that high standards can frighten off students who don't really want to take the class, who enroll in other sections, leaving more motivated and positive students behind.
If you were to INCREASE the amount of CONTENT (material)
in your classes, would it affect student evaluations? About two-thirds (65.9%*) responded that increasing content would decrease student evaluations, against 4.8% who thought the opposite would occur, and the rest thought it would make no difference. One theory proposed to explain why evaluations are lower with more content is that with less content, the student (not knowing what the course should have covered) believes that the instructor was very successful in teaching the whole subject. With greater content, students will have to struggle to learn the material, and will blame the teacher for doing such a poor job of organizing and presenting this material. Because students do not know the amount of content that should have been included in the course, they will not know that important material has been left out of a low content class until later in life, long after the evaluations have been made. The other theory proposed is that unmotivated students prefer less work to more work.
Are student evaluations influenced by such variables as the teacher's personality, attractiveness, gender, race, dress, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability status? In response to this Continued
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