Problems with the current evaluation system

Universities and schools are increasingly relying on students’ evaluations to gauge or measure the performance of their instructors. The reason is that students are permanent observers where they watch their instructors’ attitudes, behaviors, and personality during the study period. But for universities to make critical human resource decisions based on students’ evaluations, they must make sure that students are fair, interested, and recognize the impact of their evaluations on the instructors and the university. In other words, students must not be lenient or severe with their evaluations. Moreover they should not be affected by their instructors’ traits, personality impressions, or sex.

Instructors are complaining about the accuracy of students’ evaluations, where students sometimes fill evaluation forms for each other.

The current Students’ evaluation system doesn’t reflect or influence instructors’ effectiveness and thus can’t be used to take different human resource decisions such as compensation or promotion.

The main problems with the current evaluation system include:

1.    Unfocused Evaluation: the most important responsibility of the teacher is help students to learn, yet students academic progress are rarely factors related to the evaluations.

2.   Unrelated criteria of measurement: Instructors are evaluated based on behaviors and practices that may not have any impact on the student learning. Asking questions such as “Did the instructor arrive and leave on time”? So if the instructor arrives or leaves on time doesn’t reveal that he/she is perfect is teaching, rather such question is unrelated to the job.

3.    Vague questions: questions such as “were you able to meet with the instructor during office hours”. Sometimes, students don’t meet with their instructors during office hours because they don’t like to go for one on one meeting, or because they don’t have time to do that not because the instructor is not available during office hours. If the student didn’t meet with his/her instructor during office hours, and he/she rated the instructor, the rating will be inaccurate.

4.    Undifferentiated: instructors can only earn a narrow number of possible ratings such as: “Agree”, “Disagree”, “neutral”, “Strongly Agree”, “Strongly disagree”. This system makes it impossible to distinguish great teaching from good, good from fair, fair from bad.

5.    Unhelpful: teachers reported that evaluations don’t give them useful feedback on their performance at classroom. Although feedback from evaluation are very important for identifying performance gap or discrepancy of the current performance relative to the desired performance.

6.    The results of the evaluation are subjected to leniency/severity based on many factors.

7.    Personality factors which refer to the five factor model (introversion/extroversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience) are correlated with the students’ evaluations. Student gender has effect on the accuracy of the ratings. 

This was a snapshot from a research project I have done through my MBA studies about the effectiveness of student's evaluation system at Lebanese International University.