Rick Adams
> It's a student resource that doesn't violate the rights
> of anyone. A good teacher should have no fear of being publicly
evaluated--and a poor
> teacher _should_ have his/her lack of skill exposed to other students.
I'm not particularly bothered by this site, but like Linda Woolf, I don't
buy the big assumption in the point you're making here: that bad evaluations
are necessarily the product of a "lack of skill" on the teacher's part. I'm
pretty well trusted by the students at my institution, and they sometimes
feel comfortable complaining to me about other faculty. Those complaints
have been valid at times, but they've also been invalid at times. If the
evaluations were keyed to specific criteria, and the students had to provide
evidence for their evaluations, I'd be a lot more confident in them.
And of course there's still that "nonrepresentative sample" problem - the
evaluations are essentially a version of the "radio call-in survey", which
we know don't provide much useful information.
Of course students have always shared their opinions of faculty with each
other. The fact that those opinions are now on a web site just doesn't seem
all that important to me. Life goes on. :)
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
