the Evil Line

Student evaluations. It starts with Stanley Fish, who says they're worthless:

Student evaluations [...] are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

Stupid students. Don't know anything. I tell you, kids these days...

Meanwhile, Alan Jacobs agrees:

If we must have such evaluations, students should be asked for their responses to a course at least one semester after completing it. Instead, they are asked for their judgments near the end of a semester, when they are probably busier and more stressed than at any other time, and when they haven't completed their final work for the class or received their final evaluations. It’s a perfect recipe for useless commentary.

Apparently Jacobs thinks my evaluations of him back in 2004 were "useless commentary." I'm now sorry I spent ten minutes filling out that form.

I agree with Ross Douthat:

Such evaluations will always be necessarily imperfect measures of a teacher’s real quality. But in the context of a higher education system that has radically undervalued teaching skills in favor of a “publish or perish” model of professorial advancement, I think there’s a strong case for placing more emphasis on how students react to their classroom experience, however provisional those reactions may be.

Douthat wins this exchange because Fish and Jacobs are both too absolute. Of course student evaluations are imperfect, and maybe they would be better if they were given a semester later, and yes students aren't always the right judge of a good teacher. But evaluations do tell you something, and something important and useful.

A concrete example: my students last semester told me in their evaluations that I skipped too many steps when I did example problems in class. Next semester I was much more careful about this, and it went much better. Those teaching evaluations were worth doing.