AT ISSUE: Course evaluation is ‘a good idea gone terribly bad’

By Graeme Decarie, History

Students considering taking a course will ask other students what they think of the professor. So they should, because getting a professor who’s inarticulate or erratic can be a disaster.

The original idea behind course evaluation was simply to extend that opinion sampling so all students could know what they were getting into. It was a good idea, but we blew it.

Professors were massively opposed to the idea, and their opposition meant that the university would never approve of it, but the university also wanted to look sympathetic to the students, so compromises were hammered out.

To placate the professors, it was proposed that only they and the administration, but not the students, would see the results of the evaluations.

As well, responding to demands to improve teaching, the university would require professors to submit their evaluation results as evidence of good teaching in order to get promotions or salary increases.

Now, that was bone-headed. It gave us a course evaluation useless to students for any purpose at all, and also useless as an evaluation of teaching.

Students are the ones who see teaching all day. Shouldn’t that make them experts on it? It shouldn’t, and it doesn’t. I have driven a car for years, but I am not an expert on automotive mechanics. Almost every person on earth has spent considerable time in classrooms, so if that is all it takes to make one an expert on education, then almost everyone on earth is already an expert.

Very few people are experts on education, and those few are experts because they have years of study and experience in the field. To judge a professor’s effectiveness would require some standard measure of what students know before the course and what they know after. No one has the faintest idea how to do that.

Students, before checking off whether the professor sets appropriate goals, would have to know precisely what goals might be appropriate for the discipline, for the age group, and for the employment market facing the student. Most students have no idea about any of that. (Nor are they alone in their innocence.)

Students can certainly offer up useful impressions of a professor, useful enough to help others decide about taking a course, and they should have the opportunity to do so and to share them, but they are impossibly lacking in both training and experience as evaluators of teaching.

Education is up to its ears in evaluation systems that are both ignorant and destructive; the Maclean’s ranking of universities and the Fraser Institute’s ranking of high schools spring to mind. It’s bad enough we have to suffer this nonsense from journalists and political hacks, but we should not be playing in the gutter ourselves.

Let’s get honest with course evaluations. Let’s use them for their original and valid purpose, as opinion guides for students. If we professors lack the courage to do that, then let’s at least be professionally responsible. Let’s scrap them.