Your professor is teaching a class on assessment and quality. Write a post responding to the professor's question. Express and support your opinion and contribute to the discussion in your own words. An effective response has at least 100 words.
Dr. Yusuf Mansaray
Most universities evaluate teaching by asking students to complete a survey at the end of each course. Supporters argue that students are the only people who see the teaching every week and that the surveys catch problems nothing else would. Critics reply that the scores track how entertaining and how generous a marker the lecturer is rather than how much students learn, and that they penalise demanding courses and unfamiliar teachers. Should teaching continue to be evaluated this way? Why?
Aisha
I would keep them, but only for the written comments. The numerical score is where all the well-documented bias lives, and it is also the part administrators use, which is the worst possible combination. The comments are far harder to summarise and far more informative, and I have never seen a set of them that did not identify the real problem with a course.
Petr
The comments carry bias too; they are simply harder to measure it in. What I would add is that both parts are collected at the wrong moment. A survey completed in the last week asks students to judge a course before they have used any of it, and the courses that turn out to matter are often the ones that felt hardest at the time. Asking two years later would give different answers, and probably better ones.