Student Evaluations, Grade Inflation and Pluralistic Teaching: Moving from Customer Satisfaction to Student Learning and Critical Thinking

Faculty at universities that place significant weight on student evaluations often report that they give out easy grades, avoid controversial material and dumb down courses in order to get higher student evaluations. Unfortunately, research on student learning indicates that challenging courses, especially those that challenge students' existing mental models, facilitate greater learning. Meanwhile, research on student evaluations indicates that grading more easily and teaching easier courses has, at best, a small impact on student evaluations. Thus, ironically, faculty perceptions about student evaluations are more problematic than student evaluations themselves. In order to improve the quality of teaching, it is important for universities to develop a system for evaluating teaching that emphasizes (and rewards) the degree of challenge and learning that occurs in courses. This can be achieved by altering student evaluation forms to emphasize the amount students learn and the amount of work they do in a course. Additional possibilities include the development of a more robust system of peer evaluation of teaching and of teaching materials. Given that heterodox economists teaching pluralistic material tend to challenge the status quo, it is particularly important for an evaluation system to reward teaching that challenges students' perceptions of the world. Otherwise heterodox teachers will not be evaluated fairly.