hot take: student evaluations of teachers at the university level are actively harmful to teachers, pedagogy, and the students themselves and therefore should be abolished. they do not serve a productive purpose in a climate where the vast majority of teachers are adjunct and not tenured professors.
on the one hand, there's obviously a power imbalance between students and teachers, and it's legitimate to seek mechanisms through which students can correct injustices. however, there is a large power imbalance between adjuncts and tenured faculty, and it's the tenured faculty who usually take action on student evaluations, which impacts adjuncts but not the tenured faculty. so if the injustice is not the adjunct's fault but the tenured faculty's...what then?
i've seen this multiple times now where the issue is traceable to the tenured faculty or the administration, but an adjunct takes the fall for it, functioning as a scapegoat. students feel heard, tenured faculty/admin have "addressed" the issue but...the conditions that created it in the first place remain unchanged. that looks classist to me.
@paeneultima ughhhhhhhh
@walruslifestyle I will find the article when I’m at my actual laptop, but a huge study was done and concluded that the only things evaluations do is prove how sexist a college is. By extension their only use should then be to use them as a roadmap to make it not sexist.