Always to avoid their wrath, always to court their favor, and sometimes to cajole them into a little learning--that is teaching.
Talk Softly and Grade Easy.
--D. Larry Crumbley
Although student-generated numerical evaluation forms (or SNEFs) are often used to determine whether an instructor is a bad, good, or excellent teacher, these forms, many experts contend, rarely, if ever, provide accurate assessments of instruction.
If good teaching is correlated with, or defined in terms of, student learning, mastery, or cognitive growth, then SNEFs have severe limitations as assessment tools. According to John C. Damron, a Canadian sociologist who has examined the research on SNEFs, "the ratings yielded by virtually all teaching evaluation procedures bear only a modest or nonexistent relationship to the very quality effective teaching must promote: student learning" (Damron "Three" 5). The problem, according to two experts who have studied the issue, is that "students are less than perfect judges of teaching effectiveness if the latter is measured by how much they have learned. If how much students learn is considered to be a major component of good teaching, it must be concluded that good teaching is not validly measured by student evaluations in their current forms" (Rodin and Rodin, in Damron "Three" 20).
Ironically, some experimental studies revealed an inverse relationship between evaluation ratings and student learning. Sullivan and Skanes (1974), for example, found a sizable group of instructors who facilitated high achievement in their students but who received low ratings from them, and a second group who prompted low student achievement but nonetheless received high ratings (Damron "Three" 8). Many other studies have revealed the same unsettling correlation. So, when SNEFs are assumed to be "true" and "valid" assessments of pedagogical effectiveness, as administrators are too apt to do, they constitute what Damron calls "a major threat to college teaching, a prospect that surely counts as one of the more startling ironies of modern educational technology" (Damron "Three" 12).(1)
In light of the accumulating research on the invalidity and sundry pernicious effects of SNEFs, Paul Rosenfeld and S. C. Erikson, two researchers at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, University of Michigan, recommend that colleges "eliminate the questionable practice of using the results of student ratings for purposes of administrative assessment" (in Damron "Politics" 19). Michael Scriven, who has conducted extensive analyses on faculty evaluation methodology, warns administrators against using such invalid forms for personnel decisions :
All [SNEFs] are face-invalid and certainly provide a worse basis for adverse personnel action than the polygraph in criminal cases. Based on examination of some hundreds of forms that are or have been used for personnel decisions (as well as professional development), the previous considerations entail that not more than one or two could stand up in a serious [legal] hearing. (in Haskell 9)But the elimination of SNEFs is not going to happen any time soon because they serve purposes that have nothing to do with evaluating effective teaching. They serve, for example, a PR function. However fraudulent they may be, SNEFs allow administrators to tell students, taxpayers, regents and legislators that teaching is being evaluated and "good" teaching encouraged. Students want SNEFs because these forms enable them to compel professors to give the kind of course students prefer, which, to an increasing number of students, usually means a course that has few demands and high grades. SNEFs allow students to reward professors for doing the wrong thing (Hocutt 61).
In this the interests of administrators and students coincide. Administrators want satisfied student consumers (and happy parents and taxpayers). So administrators use SNEFs to make sure that classroom instruction does not seriously displease student "customers." Through SNEFs, administrators "encourage" professors not to be too rigorous and too 