Controversy Surrounding Student Evaluations In Schools

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There is a lot of controversy surrounding student evaluation of teaching (which will be referred to as SET for the remainder of this essay) concerning the capability of students to remain unbiased while performing them and the utilization of the information received. Many teachers distrust the information obtained and hold that the students are biased because of their grade received. Whereas, students often doubt that their feedback is taken seriously and may also be concerned that the responses they give will remain anonymous. Both are important areas for concern given that SET is intended to monitor the quality of education students are receiving by giving them a safe platform to voice their concerns when they have them. By making the evaluations public it will both increase percentages of SETs and assure students that their voice is heard. The connection between quality of data collected by SETs and quantity of students responses is a widely known disadvantage and since many evaluations have been transferred to online and the response rates have dropped (Pileicikiene, 2014). This may be due to a number of reasons …show more content…

Evaluations cannot be made early in the semester because students will not have had enough time to make an accurate assessment, increasing the chance that they will have a good prediction of what their end grade will be. The matter of a dependency relationship, therefore, does need to be taken into consideration (Hoefer, Yurkiewicz, & Byrne, 2012). It is possible for teachers to bolster their reviews by giving higher grades than earned and they subsequently might obtain more negative reviews from students who are doing poorly. In addition, there is some interest involving the subconscious aspect of this relationship where the student is unaware of their bias and how it is affecting the evaluation (Hoefer, et al.,