At the end of each semester, students evaluate their professors, but a new study has found that the ratings produced have no correlation with student learning.
The study, published Sept. 19 by researchers at Mount Royal University, suggests that past reports linking high levels of student learning to well-rated professors “are not interpretable.”
The researchers found that past studies of student evaluations on teaching (SET), only looked at small sample sizes, which allowed for publication bias.
“SET ratings are used to evaluate faculty’s teaching effectiveness based on a widespread belief that students learn more from highly rated professors,” the study stated. “These findings suggest that institutions focused on student learning and career success may want to abandon SET ratings as a measure of faculty’s teaching effectiveness.”
SET ratings do not include external websites, such as Rate My Professor.
Charles Doutrelepont, a French professor at Carleton University, said he disagrees with the study.
“If you don’t have the student evaluation, what would that mean for the [professor]? [They] would be evaluated mainly by the director or the chair,” Doutrelepont said. “Then the professor has to have a good relationship with the chair . . . I thought the article was pretty negative about student evaluations. I believe that they were going too far.”
Matthew Bellamy, a Carleton history professor, also said he disagreed with the findings. He said students evaluate professors in a different way than teaching departments.
“I guess [the department is] evaluating us in a different way, but at the end of the day they’re not in the classroom, watching us teach, and so this is why [SETs] are really special,” he said.
“[SETs] are absolutely key, in the sense that it’s feedback from the students,” Bellamy said. “That could come in the form of texts, emails. But it’s driven home and made demonstrable to the university in those student evaluations.”
Connor Thibodeau, a second-year Carleton public affairs and policy management student, said he only evaluates professors highly if he feels they “deserve it.”
“If I am in this class and it’s hard, and my [professor] is doing everything he can, then I’ll have leniency to give him a higher mark,” Thibodeau said. “But if I’m not doing well and I haven’t done the readings or anything, then it might not be the fault of the professor, it might be me.”
Thibodeau said some students rate professors poorly based on their own performance in the class, and that could be a flaw with student-teacher evaluations.
However, he added that removing SET ratings entirely, as the study suggested, would be a “two-step forward, one-step back” situation.
