On voluntary vs. mandatory student reviews — in any customer-review field, people are more likely to speak out when they’ve had a particularly good or particularly bad experience (try to get anything out of online hotel reviews, for example). Making them universal improves the quality, because you can get a sense of the average reaction to a professor, rather than just the extremes.

As for an actual faculty adviser encouraging grade inflation to improve student evaluations, that sounds like a reason to fire a faculty adviser, not an argument against student evaluations. If a school’s staff can’t be trusted to maintain grading integrity (or in this case, even pretend to), student evaluations are the least of the institution’s problems.

Also, if you’re going to pre-distribute the syllabus and have students sit in for a week before deciding on each class, you’re opening the door to students simply finding easy classes and good-looking professors, which are two of evaluations’ pitfalls anyway. I’d argue it’s a lot more efficient to save everyone the week.

Are there problems with student evaluations? Sure, and the peer-review idea seems like it could be helpful (though there’s the extra cost of other professors’ time, and the issue of professional courtesy that could distort the reviews). And as your reader said, schools need to bear the limits in mind. But they do have value, and again, if the school doesn’t oversee them and make sure they answer the important questions, they just pop up on the ‘net elsewhere anyway.