Every year I compete with my colleagues for a share of merit-pay money. To get scores this high, I have to make a lot of students happy. There's the rub. Students themselves say this on evaluation forms, and research confirms it. One study found that for every 10 percent increase in the amount of material students learned, the professor's rating decreased by a half-point.
Many college students are unprepared for the rigors of higher education.
Growing numbers cannot read, write or compute proficiently and have, at best, only a weak grasp of basic historical and cultural information. Even worse, many students now coming to college have almost no desire to learn, to know and understand things outside their narrow vocational interest. Students are inattentive, easily bored and unwilling to work hard, especially on difficult or abstract material outside their interests. Because of numerical evaluation forms, these students have a powerful say in how hard they are worked and graded. To get high scores, most instructors have to please them, or at least not upset them.