To Improve College Education, Try Ditching Student Course Ratings
Student Ratings Pressure Professors to Not Demand Hard Work
Usually more information is better. When students rate the courses they just took, their ratings create information. It has valuable functions. It can help the instructors improve their courses. It can help future students know which courses will be more satisfying to them, perhaps which ones will make it easier to get an A. There may be other benefits.
The existential contrarian asks, however, what is the cost? Might colleges do better without such evaluations?
Although I initially supported evaluations, I have come to think they do more harm than good. They put pressure on instructors to make the students happy. This means more entertainment, less hard work of learning. It means giving good grades: Abundant evidence has confirmed that students’ course ratings are heavily swayed by whether they expect to get a good grade. Professors who grade rigorously and harshly will get lower ratings. To avoid that, professors lower standards, and students learn less.
Tragically, it turns out that students’ ratings of a particular course have almost no correlation with how much they learn. If anything, the correlation is negative: Pushing the students hard makes them learn more, but they (at least some of them) give more negative ratings.
My business school colleagues had an apt summary for the change. In the past, the students were the product. Now, they are the customers. Treating them as the product means ensuring high quality, so standards can be high. Treating them as customers means giving them what they want, which is low standards, less work. Quality declines.
The incentive structure for professors is clear and stern. Often the professor’s annual salary raise is partly based on student ratings of his or her courses. And keep in mind, almost all professors’ annual raises are below the rate of inflation, so in effect their real salary goes down a bit each year. (For those not conversant in economics, if your salary goes up by 2% but inflation that year was 3%, it means that your new salary won’t go as far or buy as much as last year’s salary, even though the dollar amount of your paycheck has increased. A small difference each year, but they add up.) It is imperative to get the best raise one can, to reduce the gradual loss of real income.
To get the best raise, you need good ratings from your students. Some studies, including an in-house one at Florida State when I was on faculty there, find that the strongest predictor of student ratings is the grade they expect to get. So to get a decent raise, a good strategy is to give out A’s like Halloween candy.
Many changes to social systems have unintended consequences. I doubt that the people who started the trend to have students rate their courses expected that this would contribute to a decline in academic and educational quality. And getting rid of them might have other unexpected consequences. But I think it is worth a try. Ideally, a large number and variety of colleges would get rid of evaluations, while others would keep them, and we could see over time which performed better. (To be sure, measuring performance can be tricky. One could at least assess grade inflation, so as to confirm that grades inflate more when professors are punished for holding high standards.)
An influential article in psychology (see below) documented some of the damage done by course evaluations. In one particularly elegant study at an Italian university, there were some advanced courses that were fed by several different introductory courses, with different sections taught by different instructors. Sure enough, in those introductory courses, the professors who graded more harshly and assigned more work got lower teacher ratings than the easier ones. But in the follow-up advanced course, the students who had had the more rigorous professor performed better! Thus, the professors who caved in to the pressure to give easier grades turned out less well educated students. But those professors got higher ratings and, if student ratings were factored into salary merit raises, they would have gotten higher salaries.
The upshot is a gradual doom loop that is slowly eroding American university educations. Course ratings punish professors who demand hard work and hold high standards. The punishment includes less pay, thus being less able to provide for the professor’s own family. So professors make courses easier and give higher grades for lower quality work. Competition makes this an ongoing process of decline, as the norms keep shifting toward making everything easier.
Grade inflation has eroded competitiveness and students’ motivation to study. All reports are that students spend much, much less time studying than they did a few decades ago. Less studying means less learning. It’s not plausible that they can learn as much material in half the time. Most professors I know yield to the pressure to assign less work and give higher grades, lest the students punish them with bad ratings. And from the student’s perspective, why knock yourself out studying hard when it’s easy to get an A, and the worst case is a B? When I was in college the competition was intense, and the ambitious ones among us attended all classes and did many hours of homework every day. Even that didn’t guarantee an A.
A recent article and podcast in the Chronicle of Higher Education listed other problems stemming from course evaluations. Professors feel they have to be on call all the time, need to deal with students’ personal problems and complaints, cannot enforce deadlines, and more. These are legitimate concerns.
But to me, the pressure to keep lowering standards and reducing homework assignments is central to what is reducing the quality of American higher education. Really, attending class and doing many hours of homework make for a much better education.
Note comments are welcome for this post.
Sources:
Wolfgang Stroebe, “Why good teaching evaluations may reward bad teaching: On grade inflation and other unintended consequences of student evaluations.” Perspectives on Psychological Science (Vol. 11, pp. 800-816, 2016).
Jack Stripling, ‘Why faculty hate teaching evaluations’. College Matters, from the Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/podcast/college-matters-from-the-chronicle/why-faculty-hate-teaching-evaluations
This part is the key: "My business school colleagues had an apt summary for the change. In the past, the students were the product. Now, they are the customers. Treating them as the product means ensuring high quality, so standards can be high. Treating them as customers means giving them what they want, which is low standards, less work. Quality declines."
To be precise, graduates (and the reputation they create for past and future graduates) is the product, which we sell to prospective students. There are two ways to maintain that reputation:
1. let anyone come to a school, hold high standards within classes, and graduate strong graduates,
or
2. restrict who comes into the school to high quality applicants, and release them into the world four years later.
(Or combinations of these two tactics.)
It seems to me that schools we'd consider "good" (i.e., elite colleges, however you want to define that) have used (2) to a greater extent over the last 50 years (with some fudge factors to accomplish goals that some find laudable and others find awful), while faculty of all levels have bemoaned the decline of the high standards implied by (1). But it also seems to me that the more someone running the school lets the admissions office focus exclusively on student quality, the less it matters for graduates and their reputation whether standards within the classes are high or low.
I teach at a nonselective regional public college, and there is a considerable focus on "student success", defined as students passing classes and graduating. There is essentially no focus on what they have learned within or across those classes, and it is clear to me that I would be smiled upon if I were to stop asking as much from my students (and I do not ask for much). My friends who teach at more selective schools get more out of their students each semester than I do, but they report feeling as if they push them less than I feel that I push mine. I suspect that it's just that my typical admitted student is that much farther from what I consider a reasonable starting place than theirs are. Also, I suspect that, holding admissions policy constant, my graduates would experience a more rapid increase in reputation if I and my colleagues could coordinate on raising standards (which would also decimate graduation rates, most likely) precisely because so little of tactic (2) is used by my employer on the front end.