With the end of the semester comes the incessant stream of class evaluation emails we’ve all become accustomed to; if this is your first semester, you will be acquainted soon enough. Class evaluations can be tedious to complete, but they do serve a good purpose. The evaluations give instructors useful advice on how to improve their lectures and give them feedback on areas where they may have struggled. The problem with class evaluations comes when universities place too much stock into these measurements.
Like anything that is based on solely human input, class evaluations are susceptible to our human implicit biases. The promise of confidentiality provided by ClassEval only helps to stoke the appearance of bias in instructor evaluations. Class evaluations often have very gendered results. Student evaluations of instructors have been found to be significantly biased against female instructors. The implicit bias of students has been found to impact objective standards of instructor performance, such as their speed in grading assignments.
In the case of a study conducted by PS: Political Science & Politics, even reviews of online courses will produce disparate results based on the gender of the instructor. Two university professors teaching an identical course were the subjects of this study. The female professor did not only garner more reviews on her personality and appearance, but her overall review scores tended to lag behind those of her male counterpart.
From a purely methodological standpoint, course evaluations have been assessed to be erroneous. Studies analyzing the effectiveness of teaching evaluations have shown that they do lack external validity, meaning that the results from them cannot necessarily be generalized to other aspects of instructors. Additionally, research has shown that student evaluations generally do not measure the effectiveness of professors – the very aspect that they are created to measure.
The gendered results do not just stop at end-of-semester course evaluations. Review sites such as the ever-popular RateMyProfessor.com have also been tainted by the implicit biases of students. The online review site recently removed its feature of being able to rate the “hotness” of professors. The tool was rightfully scrutinized for serving no real purpose in reviewing the effectiveness of a professor. Many professors found the tool to be nothing more than a way for students to objectify female academics.
NC State admits to using the troubling policy of giving instructors promotions and tenure based on class evaluations. Officials in the Office of Institutional Research and Planning should be aware that by linking implicitly biased evaluations to the career trajectory of instructors, NC State is only helping to reinforce gender inequity in the workforce.
Because it is so difficult to adjust for student bias in evaluations, NC State should move away from using them as a mode of instructor review. Instead, the university should find alternative methods of reviewing teachers such as the Teaching Practices Inventory, suggested by Stanford professor Carl Wieman.
Course evaluations should instead be used as tools for instructors to view feedback from their students in a way that is not linked to the future of their jobs. In the meantime, ClassEval emails should work to make students aware of their implicit biases. By bringing attention to this issue, female instructors may see sexist evaluations of themselves mitigated.
When you’re completing class evaluations this week, do your professors a favor and give them accurate reviews based solely on their teaching performance. While the university continues to rely on flawed evaluation methods, it is up to students to ensure that their instructors are given fair treatment in the evaluation process.
