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.
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.
1 comment:
This evaluation system is the most wrong one because it will be unfair for the students and the teachers. For Teachers it doesn’t give them useful feedback on their performance at classroom and it's impossible to distinguish great teaching from good from bad and. I am against this system because they obligate students to do evaluation when they come to register or when they want to see their grades. So they do the evaluation randomly.
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