He says that sometimes he doesn't even receive a student's free-response portion until a few weeks before the start of the next semester. Still, Powers places more importance on the free-response section than the Scantron portion of the evaluation. A perennial topic of concern amongst the student body is their lack of access to these official evaluations. It could create problems, but it could lead professors to care a lot more about the classroom. Professors themselves are split over these issues.
Many public universities publish their TCEs.
Tenniswood said that at the last university he was at, the student government actually published a list of the top and bottom five professors in each college. But as long as salary and tenure are at least partially dependent on TCEs at Notre Dame, making such information public could pressure professors into compromising their teaching standards for a higher evaluation. I have taught enough classes now to know how one could manipulate the course structure and students to get generally high evaluations low expectations and high grades would probably do the trick. Other professors have ambiguous feelings toward the issue. It might be possible to rank professors within a department without providing the actual TCE score.