How Teacher Evaluations Broke the University

At the close of the fall semester, professors across the country will grade their students. Based on recent trends, those grades will be higher than ever. Around the same time, students will hand grades right back to their professors in the form of teacher evaluations. Those grades, too, will likely be higher than ever.

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Despite their well-documented shortcomings, evaluations matter quite a bit to academics’ careers. “Having been on many promotion and tenure committees, this is one of the main ways, if not the main way, that your teaching is evaluated when you’re being evaluated for a promotion,” Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, told me. Valen Johnson, a statistics professor and former dean at Texas A&M University, told me that evaluations are a “prominent” factor in tenure decisions.

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