Student evaluations of instructors are deeply imperfect tools that are often misused by administrators, two scholars said last month at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science.

(Hat-tip to Kim Weeden for raising the question on Twitter.) Why do colleges still have students do course evaluations? Is it because administrators are knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who don’t know ...

A couple of weeks after the end of my first semester of teaching as the instructor of record, I received “the packet” in my campus mailbox — an interoffice envelope stuffed with course evaluations ...

The saddest and most profound transformation I have witnessed nationwide in my many decades in higher education is professors’ increasing fear of college students. This fear, borne of the increasing ...

Tis the season for student evaluations of their instructors, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on how best for administrators to read them. In a phrase: look for outliers. It’s really about ...

Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Not too long ago, researchers at a large Midwestern university arranged to have a speaker give the ...

At the end of each semester, college students have a chance to give feedback to their professors in the form of student evaluations, basically “rating” them. On the whole, professors are often not ...

Allen Blay, CPA, Ph.D., calls his first semester teaching college students at the University of Florida 25 years ago a “relative disaster.” “I tried to mimic someone else who was much funnier than I ...

Men are “scientific,” women are “lovely” and underrepresented minorites are “pleasant” and “nice.” If those sound like stereotypes, they are. But they’re also words commonly used to evaluate medical ...