In her, Bias, the Brain, and Student Evaluations of Teaching, Deborah J. Merritt advises that,
...many professors report that reliance on these measures—particularly on isolated numerical averages—is growing in tenure, promotion, salary, and other decisions. The academy has been particularly silent in response to questions about racial bias in conventional teaching evaluations. Few articles engage the eloquent critiques that individual minority professors have raised, and schools do not seem to have examined their practices in response to these concerns.
That message is paralleled in Daniel Hamermesh and Amy Parker's, Beauty in the Classroom: Professors’ Pulchritude and Putative Pedagogical Productivity. They observe that,
Regardless of the evidence and of beliefs about this issue, however, instructional ratings are part of what universities use in their evaluations of faculty performance—in setting salaries, in determining promotion, and in awarding special recognition, such as teaching awards. Thus even if instructional ratings have little or nothing to do with actual teaching productivity, university administrators behave as if they believe that they do, and they link economic rewards to them.
So if student evaluations are often unreliable and quite possibly discriminatory—and administrators know it—perhaps the accountability focus has been far too narrow.
Most of what we call management consists of
making it difficult for people to get their work done.
—Peter Drucker (1909-2005)
