Should Students be evaluating Teachers?

Should Students be asked to evaluate Teachers? A simple question and not so new either, yet heavily debated. In just last one week, I got to hear two exact opposite views (including very passionate argument about why their opinion is the correct one). And this dilemma exists not only in Indian education environment, but equally in the West as well.


I will not go into all the details of those arguments; but one point caught my attention: Do students know what is best for them?


If students are allowed to evaluate professors, while they haven’t really matured yet, there is an inherent risk of students giving higher rating to ‘easy going’ professors and lower rating to the ones who challenge them the most. Especially in Indian Education system (which is often charged with producing ‘followers’ and not ‘leaders’), this may further dampen student creativity and innovation capabilities. Even teachers, in a fiercely competitive teaching job market, will be tempted to satisfy their ‘customers’; overlooking how to produce the bestest engineers / bestest mathematicians / bestest scientists. Who will be the ultimate looser … probably the student herself.


On the other hand, how will teachers effectively reach out to students if they don’t even know if students are listening to them? Assuming that teachers know all and that students do not know how to ‘receive’ education, is an equally wrong assumption. (Do students not know a good e-learning website from a bad one? If yes, what tells us that they will not know good teacher from a bad one?) Coupled with this is the new way of looking at student psychology and pressures they are faced with on a day to day basis. I am sure we all were forced to put our thinking hats (even for a moment) while watching 3 Idiots or reading news of student suicides. If only teachers could have listened to / heard students views, some of these unfortunate incidents could have been avoided.


But in the end, the question remains. Do Students know what is best for them? And I for one, tend to equate this to the corporate world … do our customers know what is best for them? And irrespective of anyone’s views on this, let me say in the same breath, that all corporates value customer satisfaction scores higher than most other business measurements.


Ok then! My two cents: we need to experiment with this idea … get students to evaluate teachers … and rather than arguing about the intent … we need to focus on creating a good evaluation questionnaire that can address the negativity surrounding this dilemma.


What say?

Can Education Institute Inspire Entrepreneurship?

Last week, I was invited to QMTI, one of the technical and management training institutes in Pune, India. Occasion was ‘The Annual Projects Event’ and I was the chief guest. QMTI works dedicatedly for rehabilitating disabled soldiers and their dependents. I was supposed to look at various projects done by these soldiers and say few words of encouragement. It was that simple.

And as expected, the whole thing was mostly uneventful. I went there, looked at all the projects and gave a small 10~12 min speech.

Most soldiers were only 10^th / 12^th pass and QMTI had given them some ITI equivalent training (basic electronics, soldering, welding, some computer hardware and software basics etc.). From that perspective, the projects were still quite good and reflective of what they had learned. But from the professional industry perspective, most projects were very simple, easy to do, and kind of non-challenging to our engineering minds.

So rather than project ideas, what I took home were two key observations and a very important learning.

Key Observations:

1. Most projects were ‘fully developed units / working models’ (not just diagrams, presentations or static models)
2. Jawans were immensely proud of their work and they were explaining their projects to me with all enthusiasm and energy

Key Learning:

After the ceremony, I was offered tea in QMTI director’s office. Couple of his colleagues joined us. And what I learned here made my whole visit worthwhile … about 12~14% students from each batch end-up starting their own shop / business. This number is far higher than entrepreneurial start-ups from most BA/BCom/BSc colleges in India, comparable to THE best professional colleges in India, and even higher than government setup entrepreneurial development organizations (like MCED in Maharashtra).

If these students, with only knowledge of welding and soldering, with some disability, in their 30s / even 40s in some cases, and with no financial support from friends/family, were able to take risk of entering own business, I wondered what makes students from established colleges think otherwise?

May be there is something to learn from the way QMTI ‘delivers training’.