Students Evaluate Professor's Teaching Performance: Analysis

A teacher, whether in High School or in college, is evaluated by students for his/her promotion, salary, tenure decision and overall course improvement.The question is whether the evaluation by student is reasonable to consider for the teacher's promotion or for the course improvement?In some schools and colleges, the student evaluation is weighed more than any other criteria for the teacher's promotion.In some colleges, the student's evaluation is not as important as the Professor's ability to bring research funding to the Department when tenure decisions are made.However, for most of the teaching only positions in colleges, the promotion and salary increase are based on the student's evaluation of Professor's effective teaching.For the student's evaluation system to be an effective one, it should serve both the purpose of faculty's promotion and the course improvement.Anyways, there is no proven method available for use to justify that the student's evaluations are good enough to consider 100% for the course improvement or for the Professor's promotion or salary decisions.This paper is going to analyze the ways how the student evaluation rubrics are designed and used.Specifically, this paper focuses on the student's evaluations of teaching effectiveness for the course improvement and the promotion and salary rise decisions of nontenure line teaching faculty in Colleges and Universities.This paper uses the literature available for the past few years and some data obtained from current students to see which rubrics make sense to them.