inflated

an article in that renegade rag inside higher ed, complete with acres of reader comments, discusses a recent study that suggests the specious nature of student evaluations. evaluations have been historically and class-by-class linked to grade inflation. plus student evaluations seem to be skewed in favor of gender, language skills, and appearance, among other factors.

this is distressing, and not just because the study casts aspersions on the teaching skills of those of us professors who are extremely good looking. the IHE article acknowledges that the correlation between good grades and high professor evaluations could partly reflect the idea that students learn more, and do better, when the teaching is very good. now, i will never deny grade inflation, and i do tend toward thinking that students are not always the best judges of teaching skills or abilities, or even of how much they've learned. but i would like to suggest another possibility for the high correlation. what if college instructors are setting the bar really high and students are meeting it and think highly of the teacher who thought enough of them to hold them to high standards?

i guess it could be a combination of factors (including very different ones) that could explain the high correlation between good student evals and good grades, but i for one am interested in fighting blanket characterizations of students as entitled bribable lazybones. even if i sometimes suspect it.