Student Rating of Teaching

Abstract

E must agree that teaching should be good teaching. Our aim here is to propose but one of many available means which can contribute to this goal, a means of letting the cooks know how the guests respond to the food. The 1965 Byrne Report, commissioned by the Forbes Committee of the University of California Board of Regents, says: There are a wide variety of devices available for ap praising the competence of teachers, including ratings by students [italics ours], former students, graduate assistants and departmental colleagues, classroom visits by ad hoc committees, and careful scrutiny of reading lists, examina tion questions, and laboratory assignments. These tech niques are not, however, usually employed. Instead, de partment chairmen are asked to evaluate candidates for promotion on the basis of whatever evidence they can easily accumulate. They are not asked to rate a man's teaching ability in comparison to other teachers in the department. The net result is that almost all appraisals of teaching ability tend to be favorable, and candidates for promotion and salary increments are accepted or rejected on the basis of their published work. This fact is known to faculty, and in some cases has very likely had a negative effect on the amount of effort devoted to classroom per formance. This method of selecting faculty may also pre vent some talented teachers from obtaining tenure, al though the number of such cases is probably low. It is also true that neither the Regents nor any other group has tried to establish monetary rewards for outstanding teach ing comparable to those for outstanding research. Token awards of a few hundred dollars have been tried at Berkeley, but no serious effort involving the budgeting of hundreds of thousands of dollars required to have a major impact has been made. (Text . . ., 1965, p. 7.) We concern ourselves here with the use of ratings by students for the use of faculty (and perhaps administrators). The purposes of student evaluation are: