The saddest and most profound transformation I have witnessed nationwide in my many decades in higher education is professors’ increasing fear of college students. This fear, borne of the increasing ...

Men are “scientific,” women are “lovely” and underrepresented minorites are “pleasant” and “nice.” If those sound like stereotypes, they are. But they’re also words commonly used to evaluate medical ...

Two recent papers argue that using student surveys to evaluate professors is fundamentally flawed. At Denny's, diners are asked to fill out comment cards. How was your meal? Were you satisfied with ...

Emily Wu and Kenneth Ancell, two students at the University of Oregon, approached their honors research professor, Bill Harbaugh, a few years ago about studying the relationship between student ...

Patrick Bigsby is an alumnus, former employee, and lifelong wrestling fan of the University of Iowa. Sometimes, he tweets. If you’re reading this, chances are good that you’ve already heard that ...

When I began my teaching career two decades ago as an adjunct instructor, I cared a lot about my end-of-course student evaluations—but quite frankly—they mostly served as a means to job security. Over ...

Your article, “Colleges Are Getting Smarter About Student Evaluation. Here’s How” (The Chronicle, January 13), may indicate that colleges and universities are paying more attention to the issue of ...

Any young woman considering a career in university teaching or research must be mightily discouraged from doing so by the constant stream of news telling her that she will face daunting discrimination ...

When Linda Arnold came to Virginia Tech in 1982, she was told of a professor in the history department who turned in his student evaluations, as expected, at the end of the semester. Weeks later, he ...

(Hat-tip to Kim Weeden for raising the question on Twitter.) Why do colleges still have students do course evaluations? Is it because administrators are knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who don’t know ...

Not too long ago, researchers at a large Midwestern university arranged to have a speaker give the same lecture to 154 undergraduates enrolled in eight sections of a required course. Or almost the ...

Allen Blay, CPA, Ph.D., calls his first semester teaching college students at the University of Florida 25 years ago a “relative disaster.” “I tried to mimic someone else who was much funnier than I ...