Students could do no wrong, and I did almost anything possible to keep them happy, all of the time, no matter how childish or rude their behavior, no matter how poorly they performed in the course. His colleagues, too, told him that if he wanted to improve his ratings and get tenure, he should be more entertaining, both in and out of class, Mr. Sacks writes. The superficial changes he made in his teaching style led to significantly better ratings from students, he writes, although he doesn't believe that students learned any more. The love of learning was completely whitewashed out. Paul A. Trout, an associate professor of English at Montana State University, says most professors have learned how to get good ratings from students.
Some professors stick to their guns and get punished.
But an awful lot of people have figured out how to get their numbers high enough so that the evaluations are not a liability to them. People are changing their teaching, the rigor of their courses, to insure they get tenure. As a young assistant professor of political science at Kalamazoo College, Jeremy D. Mayer is acutely aware of how important student ratings are. He says he has always received topnotch ratings from students, in part because he is a good teacher. But he is also aware that this generation of students, raised on Sesame Street and MTV, wants to be entertained.