College Customer Satisfaction

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the chancellor of Texas A&M University proposes to award performance bonuses to professors who score highest on student ratings. He defends this very bad idea by arguing that "This is customer satisfaction."

Student ratings of teacher effectiveness can have their uses, especially if used along with other measures of effectiveness. Alone, they are likely to be misleading, especially in comparing teachers in different sorts of classes and different disciplines. The ratings, rightly or not, exert a lot of pressure on faculty to relax standards and raise grades in a sort of bargaining with the students. The ratings can have their uses in allowing students to report truly bad instructors, but small distinctions in the numbers on a five or seven point scale don't add up to much, it seems to me. And yet the numbers, because of their concreteness and specificity, are increasingly important in decisions about tenure, promotion, and merit.

The gradual encouragement by college and university administrators to convert colleges education to a customer model has had deeply degenerative effects on the relations between professors and students. A year or two ago, one student told me, in class, that the matter of attendance and even the question of whether to submit a particular assignment should be left to the student, since students were paying so much for their educations.