There have been a couple of separate posts on grade inflation and student evaluations recently. I, and many others, see a connection between the two. Student evaluations may be, like immigration, one of those issues that divide conservatives, the more social conservatives on the one hand from the more libertarian conservatives, if that isn’t an oxymoron, on the other hand.

Student evaluations of their professors have on the whole greatly contributed to the decline in standards across the board. They are correlated with grade inflation, dumbing-down of course content, watering down criticism of student work, avoidance of vigorous discussion which can make students feel “uncomfortable,” and a host of other things. This is pretty well known and acknowledged among professors, I think, both right wing profs concerned with decline of standards and the rise of student-centered rather than subject-centered education, and some leftwing profs who can’t help seeing the deleterious effects of evaluations in encouraging the idea of education-as-entertainment. There was a long article in Harper’s about this a few years ago by Mark Edmundson, a leftwing post-modernist, that I wrote about in Commentary and Academic Questions.

Evaluations were originally instituted to give the students some voice and to give teachers feedback. They still do that to some extent, but they have also turned into an instrument wielded by administrative bureaucrats and educationists who have no interest in subject matter and who have turned education into a commodity and students into customers simply seeking credentials and feel-good experiences. They are perhaps also popular with certain kinds of professors who see them as part of an egalitarian anti-authoritarian project. The libertarian view that students like all human beings everywhere know what is good and will seek tougher teachers and tougher course content and all that just doesn’t pan out on the whole, although of course there are exceptions. For the most part the evaluations push things further down as teachers strive to please everyone in the class in order to get the evaluations that are necessary to continue to get students into their courses or to be able to continue to teach at all, since the evaluations have become absolutely central to everything.