BY DAVID A. VAREL

When I was an undergraduate at a liberal arts college in the early 2000s, our student evaluations were all qualitative. We were asked to write short essays describing our experience in our courses—what worked, what didn’t, what could be improved. It was clear from this design that the chief audience was our professors, who would use them to create better courses.

These days, evaluations have become increasingly caught up in the neoliberal model of education. They are more quantitative in nature, less substantive, and more clearly intended for administrators to justify actions towards faculty members regarding retention, promotion, and tenure.

This model fails instructors, and it fails our students. Luckily, some simple changes to the questions could better measure effective teaching, promote better instruction, and even undermine neoliberal education. Here’s how.

The worst evaluation questions are the most subjective ones: How would you rate the difficulty of this course? How would you rate the instructor’s effectiveness? How would you rate your overall experience in this course? Because no objective criteria exist for such questions, students create their own subjective criteria and responses. This is all wrong. These types of questions, furthermore, encourage students to view themselves as consumers assessing the “product” they received—indeed, they are eerily similar to surveys sent out to customers of major corporations.

Consider how more objective questions can reframe an evaluation around tangible qualities and teaching practices that are hallmarks of effective teaching. All of these can retain the quantitative component by having students rank-order their responses on a scale (like 1–4 or 1–6) regarding how much a professor practiced that particular technique. For instance, start with fundamental questions at the heart of any well-organized course:

• Alignment: To what degree were assignments rooted in material covered in class? (1. not at all, 2. a little, 3. a significant amount, 4. a great deal)
• Diverse Assessments: To what degree did the instructor incorporate both formative assessments (more frequent, lower-stakes assignments meant to build student skills) and summative assessments (less frequent, higher-stakes assignments meant to test students’ mastery of cumulative knowledge and skills) (1. not at all, 2. a little, 3. a significant amount, 4. a great deal)
• Differentiated Instruction: To what degree did the instructor incorporate different types of instruction during class—that is, lecture, whole-class discussion, small-group discussion, debate, media presentations? (1. not at all, 2. a little, 3. a significant amount, 4. a great deal)

Evaluations should then probe the details of the instruction, which are also essential to creating a successful course:

• When did the instructor learn students’ names? (1. early on, 2. mid-semester, 3. end of semester, 4. never)
• How long, on average, did it take for the instructor to grade assignments? (1. less than a week, 2. 1-2 weeks, 3. 2-3 weeks, 4. a month or more)
• How much individualized feedback did the instructor provide on course assignments? (1. none, 2. a little, 3. a significant amount, 4. a great deal)

Similar questions could be created for other important qualities related to the timeliness of responses to emails, the instructor’s punctuality and use of the entire class period, the clarity of course objectives, the level of respect and empathy demonstrated toward students, the willingness to accommodate students’ special circumstances, the clarity of assignment requirements and expectations, the provision of resources to help students improve, and students’ development of specific knowledge and skills, to name a few.

There is, of course, much room for debate over the specifics of each question and which responses may best reflect quality teaching or even be appropriate. The nature and size of courses must certainly be taken into account, and differences will naturally emerge among disciplines.

Yet the bigger point remains: We should create evaluations that measure the concrete practices of effective teaching rather than the subjective feelings of students—which we know are biased along racial, gender, and other lines.

The result could be quietly revolutionary. Students would be forced to consider what the hallmarks of good teaching are, and perhaps even recognize that a course they did not like was administered competently. They would be discouraged from seeing themselves as consumers and encouraged, rather, to identify as pupils owed not satisfaction and ease but competency, clarity, and professionalism.

The impact could be no less transformative for instructors, especially because the education-as-commodity model has inspired some deeply problematic behaviors. Professors, responding to the serious stakes that evaluations can have on their often-precarious careers, are incentivized to try to game the system.

Anecdotes abound. I know of professors who give out cookies (which apparently works!) or announce serious changes in course expectations—like an optional final exam—right before handing out evaluations. Such unprofessional attempts at placation send all the wrong messages to students, and they undermine whatever utility the evaluations could hold in comparing the effectiveness of different instructors. More troubling, however, are the subtler ways in which professors adapt their teaching—by scaling back the rigor, inflating grades, and generally trying to please students rather than challenging them.

Reformed evaluations, conversely, would redirect instructors’ energies into becoming better teachers. Now they would be rewarded for organizing better courses and practicing the behaviors that foster student engagement and growth. The evaluations would in fact have educational value because many professors have received precious little training on how to plan or teach a course well. Knowing they will be evaluated for it, professors would be encouraged to learn students’ names, to provide timely and individualized feedback, to align their curriculums, and to adopt many of the other best practices that could improve instruction.

Although such evaluative changes are obviously no panacea, they are easy-to-implement reforms that would go a long way toward counteracting some of the problems characterizing student evaluations today.

David A. Varel is an adjunct professor of history at Metropolitan State University of Denver, a licensed public high-school teacher, and the author of two books: The Scholar and the Struggle: Lawrence Reddick’s Crusade for Black History and Black Power, and The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought.