In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call article, George Leef examines student course evaluations and concludes that they are at best unreliable. Unsatisfied with their grades or upset about the amount of work required in a course, students, at the end of the semester, can blast professors via low ratings and negative reviews. Leef points out that such evaluations encourage non-tenured faculty whose jobs are on the line to water down their courses and appease students at the expense of academic rigor.

A couple of UC-Berkeley professors are challenging the current course evaluation paradigm. Philip Stark and Richard Freishtat argue that student evaluations have a response bias that motivates angry students to respond with greater frequency than satisfied students, and that department heads should take such reviews with a heavy grain of salt.

The professors provide another path forward: in Berkeley’s statistics department, faculty members create portfolios with information about their teaching methods, syllabi, and class assignments, which are then reviewed by department heads. Perhaps more important, a senior faculty member attends professors’ classes and then offers comments and critiques.

Leef says that that close oversight, which is common in fields such as medicine and law, is absent in academia, particularly in disciplines outside of science and math. “I don’t expect UC-Berkeley’s statistics department’s strong system for ensuring that courses are taught well to spread into ’soft’ fields where there are no wrong answers and it hardly matters how much students have learned. But at least there is a good model available for any department that sees the importance of going beyond unreliable student course evaluations,” he writes.