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Observations On The Folly Of Using Student Evaluations Of College Teaching For Faculty Evaluation, Pay, And Retention Decisions And Its Implications For Academic Freedom, Terence Lau, William Wines

Terence Lau

Research on student teaching evaluations is vast. An examination of this research demonstrates wide disagreements but also substantial consensus of authority for the proposition that student evaluations should be used only with extreme care, if at all, in making personnel decisions. A number of reasons cause administrators to use teaching evaluations for personnel decisions. The literature, however, is virtually unanimous in its condemnation of norming student evaluations in order to rank classroom performances. Current cases on academic freedom indicate some retrenchment by the Circuits from broader pronouncements in earlier Supreme Court cases. This paper concludes that the use of non-validated …