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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

One fundamental problem in evaluating the effectiveness of educators is that the value of an educational experience is realized a long time after it is performed.

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Anecdote: When I started high school, we had a teacher in literature who everyone just hated. He was harsh, his tests were hard, the subject was boring, etc. In the third year though, most of us realized that he was very good at teaching, and the things he taught actually stuck. Many years after high school, I consider him the best teacher I've ever had.

He never tried to make himself popular, but he was relentless when it came to teaching. A student evaluation program would have been disastrous for him, and everyone would have been worse off.

While I would not thrust myself to give unbiased evaluations in high school or even at the start of college. But these days, I make an effort to always try and give valuable observations during student evaluations.

Thus I feel like student evaluations should not be discarded, but its a bad idea to have them be the sole garant of teacher performance.

So why not just do the evaluations a year or so later or even more?

Because this would make too much sense.

At my university it is already hard to get students to fill out the evaluations (they aren't mandatory but probably should be). Asking them to do so a year later would result in a near 0 response rate.

Even if evaluations were mandatory, that is no guarantee they will be taken seriously. A lot of students just "Christmas tree" their evaluations and don't offer comments.

"It is when we are using what we learned that we wish we had studied more" - Chinese proverb

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