There is, obviously, no work assigned much less graded in the ‘shopping week’ and so ‘difficulty’ is not assessed in the same way as it is in course evaluations; it merely lets students see for themselves the teachers in action and, perhaps, their general expectations through the syllabus, which is what student evaluations are meant to approximate–often poorly if the studies are to be believed. Why not hear it from the horse’s mouth?

The fact is that grade inflation exists everywhere in some form. And getting rid of a faculty member for advising a junior colleague to undertake the easy-grades approach and thereby save himself poor, potentially tenure-damaging reviews is not going to happen for the simple reason that such advice is, for obvious reasons, privately offered. If the presence of student evaluations increases the propensity of a teacher to inflate grades — and I think that it is sad but fair logic that it does — then we should be asking fundamental questions about the benefit of those evaluations. This is especially true when quality of instruction has made something of a comeback next to research and publications as a reason to grant or deny tenure; to me, it’s troubling that the criterion by which one judges this skill is evermore student evaluations, especially when they are lent a patina of authority by being aggregated and bound in a university-sponsored publication like Harvard’s Q. I’m merely trying to brainstorm what teachers actually get from this feedback that they don’t already know from their own expertise, their TAs’, and their colleagues’. I would guess there’s not much.

Another reader writes in: Why not just give the grades after the student evaluations are completed? At least for the final exam and the course grade, that’s very sensible, but what of papers, midterms, etc.?

Finally, I tend to think that students submitting course evaluations selectively, over opt-in internet sites, is a lot different and much less of a concern for students and tenure committees alike than when this flawed methodology of evaluating instructors is lent the university’s imprimatur.