Reply #1: students are notoriously poor evaluators of educational effectiveness.... [View All]

[mike_c]

...which is one of the main reasons that "business models" of education administration fail, IMO. In the end, virtually all student evaluations come down to measures of personal satisfaction with the peripheral experiences that attended instruction in a class. Students are often the LEAST able to judge educational effectiveness because their learning often takes time-- sometimes years-- to manifest in ways that are meaningful to the students themselves-- and by the time that happens, the overwhelming majority of us dissociate the meaning from prior educational experiences.

The notion that student evaluations are meaningful comes directly from the business model that equates students with consumers of educational services, and seeks to use customer satisfaction as a measure of institutional success. But that model fails because education is not a product. In the end, all educators "sell"-- the only product they offer-- is opportunity to learn. "Opportunity" is a difficult thing to quantify, and more to the point, it's nearly impossible for the recipients to judge the quality of the opportunities they're given until much later in their lives, but by then their judgments are hopelessly muddled by other experiences and attitudes.