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?
My view would be that yes,students should have a say in evaluaing the effectiveness of a teacher.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that this should be one of the criterias(and not the ONLY ONE) in a teacher's evaluation.
I agree that a suitable questionnaire would be a good starting point!
well, me being a prof i do agree that teacher's evaluation is a must.
ReplyDeletei have myself worked on designing Questionnaire and the data analyses for the same.
i wrote SAS code to analyse the data collected for the tearchers of my institute and prepared the reports teacher wise.
the overall performance index for each prof was calculated.
there were 3 attributes defined and index for each attribute was also calculated.
questionwise analysis was also done.
The prof should take such activities in their stride and use the results to introspect. it will surely help every prof to perform better.