University policy of publishing student course evaluations: Prevalence and pros and cons These days it is very common to have some course evaluation towards the end of a course, in which students respond to standardized questions on a numerical scale (e.g. between 1 and 5) and can additionally give free-form comments.

Sometimes individual lecturers make student comments (and their responses) available to the cohort in which the survey was taken and the next cohort, to show that they are open to critique and how they respond to it.

I am, however, more interested in cases where there is a departmental/faculty/university-wide policy to consistently publish evaluation results for all of their courses (averages of numerical data only, or perhaps the free-form comments as well) to the current and future cohorts. 


Is it common for universities to have a policy of publishing student course evaluations? 
What are advantages and disadvantages of doing this? 
Has this been looked at in the educational literature?
I used to adjunct at a strong college as part of a larger university where the student government was able to get a policy in place on publishing (statistics on) evaluations.  The professor/adjunct had the choice to not publish their results; but this was uncommon since then you would be an outlier and it would seem like you had something to hide.  


Pros:  Frankly, with things like "rate my professor" out there, I'd rather have everyone's evaluations take into account than just the extremes.  I think the point is that, provided we avoid the cons I will outline, there is transparency of some sort of metric of performance.  Generally I found the statistics to show something reliable about professors based on what other faculty and students said about them.  It prevents faculty from thinking they can just disregard the opinions of their students and it helps students have a consistent and official place to decide which instructor they would like to teach them (in a larger college anyway).
Cons:  You need not look far to see academics complain about this practice.  The only concern for me would be if for some reason there was some sort of plot to purposely bomb a professor's evaluations or a professor tried to game the system; these are generally not serious worries and one would hope there would be checks and balances for these concerns.