On the care and handling of student ratings — from rtalbert.org by Robert Talbert
Student evaluations of teaching are not true evaluations. We should call them what they are — perception data — and use them accordingly.
Excerpts:
How to handle student perception data as a department
- Never use student perception data as the sole, or even the main source of information about a faculty member’s teaching. Teaching, as I said, is a wickedly complex problem. It simply cannot be reduced to a set of data, or in some cases to a single number. To get an accurate picture of faculty teaching, you need more than just student perceptions. Use faculty self-evaluations, peer evaluations via class visits, faculty-initiated data collected through pre- and post-testing… Insist on using multiple sources of data for faculty evaluations and make it easy to include them.
- Never compare one faculty member to another based on student perception data.
- Look at trends over time and how faculty respond to their data.