(At my school many teachers were slow to mark and return assignments, so this benefit wasn't really achieved - but it might have been had feedback been more timely)

You just can't throw out the baby with the bathwater here just because there are things to figure out. Most of the reasons people have cited here seem like lame excuses, all easily addressable if you could get sane people to get aligned behind a well designed system. Unfortunately not everyone involved in these conversations is acting sane (or objectively in the best interests of the community) and therefore getting everyone aligned in practically impossible.

This whole conversation, BTW, reminds me a the similar debate around public access to doctor and surgeon outcome data where some doctors are amazing and others have horrendously bad success rates for specific surgeries but if you go to that doctor for that surgery you almost never are given access to that history. A large portion of the medical community is very hostile to the idea of things being otherwise which, IMO, is indefensible from a public health POV and only makes sense if you are a crappy, unscrupulous doctor seeking to avoid accountability.

There is also the third option, which the author is arguing for: that the professors do not think the ratings are an accurate reflection of their teaching skills.

Perhaps the engineering statistics professor I met who bragged that no one ever got an A on his final, because teaching wasa competition between him and the students. And the government professor I had who was inordinately proud of the fact that his course was required because three soldiers from Texas stayed in China after the Korean war and spent the rest of the first class going around the room having students introduce themselves and then mocking them. (I dropped the class the next day.) And a number who were just disorganized and incompetent, but protected by their relationship with other faculty. And the professor who was given tenure for political reasons, after threatening to fail an entire class (of a required course) of computer science undergrads because they weren't electrical engineering great students.

She also answered any questions asked in Mandarin, in Mandarin. When asked to translate an exchange for the rest of the class, she blushed and said 'it was complicated'. At the end of the semester, the class was so far behind, 1/3 of the materials for the course exam were delivered during an optional study session.

And so would the electrophysiology professor who spent over an hour of a grad seminar explaining how to use a floppy disk. Because he had trouble with computers.

I've seen courses where the students were memorising MATLAB scripts by rote for exams because almost none of them had sufficient understanding to have any chance of recreating it in the exam. Why? Because rather than teaching this stuff, the lecturer spent several lectures explaining the details of the representation of floating point number (this was a first-year class for math majors, not people doing CS).

But it was hard as student representatives for us to prove any of this, because we didn't have access to feedback responses.

That 'third option' is just an opinion about the data.

I accidentally cut myself a little too deep while doing dishes a couple years ago (opaque, soapy water and sharp surfaces don't mix well). I couldn't get the bleeding to stop (without constant pressure held for about an hour), so I went to urgent care. I knew that I needed stitches or that "glue" they use to seal wounds. I didn't care which solution the Doctor picked, but I knew I needed something.

Students have some sense of what a generally good instructional experience looks like. It's better to collect this feedback, and have people that are experts in instruction examine the reviews, synthesize with their own knowledge of what makes instruction great, and use that information to improve.

But saying we should totally close out students since "they don't know what they need" removes a fruitful data source in determining where professors can improve.

Many students are there not because they want to learn but because they want to get that piece of paper that is the ticket to a successful career. A teacher forcing them to learn, to spend time and effort studying and working, is not seen as a positive if your goal is simply to get a degree. The ideal teacher for them is someone who just give you an A no matter what. That would be the quickest and easiest way to guarantee achieving that goal.

This is the true issue here - the disconnect between what many students want from a university education and what that education is actually supposed to be.

If that's the case, many of the students in your post are right -- just giving them the degree could save them (and the school) a lot of time and money. Maybe your art history class is a cost-effective way to get a world class education in late Italian Romantic oil paintings, but as a way of proving you're smart enough to work in a law firm (or even "broaden your horizons and become a better citizen through rounded education") I can't imagine it's terribly efficient.

It's in every student's individual interests for their school's standards for admission and grading to be low, so they can obtain the credential easily.

But it's in the student body's _collective_ interests for the school's standards to be high, so the credential retains and improves its signalling value.

There's a reason a C- student at Harvard doesn't transfer to a deprived community college where they'd be at the top of every class :)

In my experience, exams are often full of ambiguous questions, questions testing knowledge that is not part of the course syllabus, etc.

If the grading was fair, I would agree with you, but it rarely is. And IMO this is what students really hate: they put in a hell of a lot of work. They actually get to grips with the material, and for stupid reasons out of their control they end up with no credit for it.

What if the feedback also said the doctor wasn't personable? Maybe the doc could be a bit warmer with his patients... and a patient would be absolutely qualified in determining whether or not that bedside manner is present.

Comments are tricky since they're both qualitative and might need to be scrubbed for anything personally-identifying.

How the university thinks they can claim ownership of data that come's from students I will never understand.

What we're pushing back against is these reviews getting turned into yet another semi-useless, noisy and biased metric we're evaluated by.

You want to recommend for/against a class to your friends? Don't care. What I'm not interested in is my dean pretending there's deep insight there.

It should not be used as precise metric of performance, but as a general trend overall. Instead of one friend giving a bad review for whatever reason, now I have access to the hundreds of bad experiences or the 99/100 good experiences.

As a student I really don't care about the dean professor relationship. I am a paying customer of the institution. I want to know if that professor is worth taking their class.

Also if you don't care about students giving praise/negative reviews to a friend, that kind of says something.

Note I didn’t say I didn’t care what those reviews were. Honestly, they’re probably more nuanced than student Evans and thus more useful in choosing classes.

We agreed to not launch the system, in exchange for limited access to the data, as I described above.

Professors en masse opposed opening up this data. That opposition alone made me feel we were doing good work. If they had to stand by their public reviews, hopefully they could stand by the quality of the instructional experience provided.

I ended up making a startup to deal with issues like this, to sell SaaS solutions directly to student governance groups, rather than to institutions. Both control fairly significant budgets (student governance groups at mid-to-large sized institutions have 6/7 figure budgets to easily afford enterprise pricing). My platforms are student-first. It's more a passion project than trying to get me Zuckerberg levels of wealth.

Personality, difficulty, ability to teach (relatively), understanding the student's pressures etc.

When I say difficulty, I mean easiness (people take the class to improve the gpa) or difficulty as in: the professor wants to make an example.

Student's pressures: Does the professor demand more than a reasonable amount of time from the student?

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All of this being said: I haven't seen a pragmatically taught course before. (As in the professor looks at the course as a means and is the person that helps facilitate the student through it) I think that's what students really look for.

But alternative isn't bias someplace else. The alternative is engaging in biased activity or not doing to.

Serving someone well doesn’t necessarily mean making them happy. Students — people who by enrolling at an institution in a course of study admit their ignorance of that domain — do not seem to me good judges of an instructor qua instructor.

There's genuine concerns that should be reasonably heard. One example is slowness in grading homework/exams/etc. What happens is professors get backlogged, and you have multiple homework/exams and the student missed on understanding some concept they were later graded on. If the student had regular grade updates, they would know where they needed to focus more on the course material to master it. Instead, those misunderstandings snowball and you end up doing worse on a final exam since you didn't know what course concepts you correctly understood and missed.

I agree broadly with the wholistic assessment of what American colleges have become. But the review process is still germane-- classes are the core offering of college.

Classes may be what students take when they go to college, but I always thought of them more as ice-breakers for the forming of relationships with instructors and fellow students and a way to foster a community of intellectual enquiry.

I've been to both American colleges and all-inclusive resorts and, no, they don't.

And yeah, they really don't.