Faculty tend to lament that student evaluations are just opportunities for students with bad grades to hammer their instructor. But I always believed that student surveys where actually designed to inflate approval ratings. They always start by asking simple class format questions, such as “Did the instructor hold regular classes?” How many instructors would fail that one? The sequence of format questions gets the student into the rhythm of giving high scores so that by the time the student reaches a real question on the quality of learning, he or she thinks to themselves, “Gee, coming in here I thought this teacher was really terrible, but after giving so many high scores, I guess maybe they’re OK.”
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